Ink is thicker than water

"Power of print media ties - wouldn't be who I am or where I am without the friends I've made at newspapers I've worked at. Love the incredible minds, passion and hearts of these dear friends. All of you!"

That was the Facebook status update of my former editor and good friend tonight after she'd left a get together at another friend's--a former food editor's--house. Underneath it, her husband--and sports page designer at the newspaper still--wrote, "Ink is thicker than water."

It made me pause. Because it was so true, so fundamentally, undeniably true.

I looked around the room tonight at our tight-knit group and I realized we were all journalism refugees, adrift in the adopted lands of public relations and social media and web design and parenthood and graduate school, redefining ourselves in more lucrative careers that in many ways are not nearly as fulfilling.

And yet, the intimate ties that bind, the power of print and words and friendships forged over layoffs, deadlines and through unimaginable crises remain. Years later. It courses through our blood, through our conversation, through our passion for life and relationships. We've stopped talking about the good old days, newspaper gossip comes up hardly as much. We've grown instead into what we've become: errant wordsmiths, seekers of truth amid unfamiliar, unforgiving office politics (for a long time, the only politics I appraised were the ones behind the dais). Seekers of each other in the rain.

This is the thing that does not change with technology or geography or awards. This is the thing that grounds us: Friendship.

I come home to find my soon-to-be-husband--a fiercely, gently opinionated ex-photojournalist now making a passionate, creative living shooting documentaries--stretched out on the couch, no doubt watching true crime series like an unending, entertaining Cops Shift. I check my email for a returned message from a retired columnist and mentor. And I'm reminded of how journalism brought us together, brought us all together, and how lucky we are to have been part of it, to have experienced it together and found each other through it, to continue to nurture these relationships beyond it.

Print will continue to change, as will we, but these moments, for me, these memories, these people, will never die.