Friends Forever Full Book Free
Christain Cobb
On April 2 we closed on and now officially own Twin Brooks Golf Course in Hyannis. This beautiful 40-acre golf course, close to Main Street and the many businesses in the heart of Hyannis, more than doubles the size of our existing campus, and allows us to move ahead with two key initiatives:
This amazing gift also endows the program and generates a healthy annual operating budget. We are actively searching for an executive director of this program, and will be reaching out to you, our alumni, alumni families and other stakeholders for suggestions as we develop this program.
Since 1957 teams of parents, trustees, faculty and administrators have been working to make our great school even better. We are one lucky school to have such a prolific history, and today we stand on the shoulders of all those who have come before us and acknowledge that none of this would be possible without the strong foundation that has been built over almost 70 years.
This is one of the most exciting times in our history, and we look forward to hearing from you, and updating you as we develop our plans and timeline. Thank you for your partnership; stay tuned for more information as the Riverview family takes the next steps in our journey together.
For questions regarding the purchase of the Twin Brooks Golf Course, Friends Forever or Riverview School please email friends...@riverviewschool.org. While we are busy in the initial planning stages, and may not have all of the answers, we will do our best to respond to questions in a timely manner.
Sweet+Savory together forever. This happy blend of granulated honey and sea salt adds a hint of sweetness to popcorn, sweet potatoes, spinach salad, lemon chicken, dark chocolate, grilled carrots, cocktails, mocktails and more!
Friends Forever is the support guild for the Nebraska Humane Society. Members believe passionately in the mission of the Nebraska Humane Society and are truly "forever friends" of homeless animals. Friends Forever supports the Nebraska Humane Society through volunteerism, fundraising and the promotion of community awareness.
The Mission of Friends Forever is to promote the general welfare of companion animals and to enhance the bond of caring between companion animals and humans. Friends Forever supports the Nebraska Humane Society by making life better for companion animals through fundraising, public education and awareness.
Two months into the trip, I met Saulius on the shores of Lake Baikal. It was sleeting, and my team spotted a ribbon of smoke in the forest and wheeled off the road to a campfire, around which huddled six Lithuanian cyclists. We shook hands, and they shared their meager food and pushed our shivering bodies toward the warmth of the birch fire. We were kin, members of the fellowship of the wheel.
Deportations of Lithuanians began immediately after the Soviet Union occupied the country, in the summer of 1940. Between 1940 and 1953, Stalin sent some 350,000 Lithuanians to Siberia. Many never returned.
Nine years later, on April 24, 1957, Palmira and her family were released and allowed to leave. Their stone farmhouse had been seized by the government and was now the residence of a Soviet oligarch, so they lived with friends in Kaunas, a small city in central Lithuania.
By the time we dipped our front tires into the ice-blue Baltic, fall had come to Russia. It was snowing and we were so exhausted we could have slept for a year. Instead we threw a party, each of us inviting someone who had meant something special to us during our ride. I invited Saulius. We sang hard and drank hard and danced hard as if it were our last night on this earth. It was the end of 1989, and the Soviet Union was imploding.
THAT WAS THE LAST time I saw Saulius, but I wrote about him in a book about that trip, Off the Map. Now, remembering our friendship, I pulled it from the shelf and read the opening passage about Saulius:
Even with the rise of computers and the Internet, even with 9/11, Afghanistan, and two Gulf wars, in the past two decades life for ordinary Americans has hardly changed at all, compared with life in Lithuania.
That night, in a kitchen with bright windows, I met his wife, Palmira, a retired professor of textiles, and his daughter, Laima, a fledgling economist. Over after-dinner coffee, conversation inevitably fell to geopolitics.
More than 20 million people died in the gulag. The post-Stalin decades were less violent, but the intellectual foot-binding continued. In 1986, Gorbachev began the process of liberalization that quickly gave 18 Soviet states their freedom. The new constitution of the Republic of Lithuania, a parliamentary democracy, was ratified by referendum in 1992.
That night we pitched our tent in a cow pasture. In the morning, we cycled along narrow, tree-lined roads, through brilliant yellow fields of rapeseed, all the way to the coast. A motorboat, owned by a father and son who had started a ferry business after independence, took us out to the Curonian Spit, a 61-mile arm of sand dotted with summer communities. We beach-camped on the Baltic, sand in our gears, the sound of the waves in our ears.
On day three we winged north along the spit from the seaside resort town of Nida (loaded with thick-calved Germans), through the port city of Klaipeda, and on to Palanga (loaded with mayonnaise-skinned Finns). Tourism appeared as buoyant as a beach ball.
In the years since independence, Lithuanians, industrious and entrepreneurial, have made their country the most successful former Soviet republic. Privatization of once nationalized companies is almost complete. Business is thriving, from bioengineering to banking; exports are robust; and in 2004 Lithuania was accepted into the European Union.
The next morning, Saulius had a stroke. I found him in the garage lying on the concrete below Laisv. I cradled him until the ambulance came. Palmira would not let me stay. I had a plane ticket back to the U.S., and she insisted I return home to my own family. Saulius is in rehab now, and it is uncertain whether he will bike again.
Seamans and Smith grew up in the Brainerd Lakes area, in the small town of Crosby, Minnesota. They were two brainy, nerdy outcasts who eventually developed a fierce mutual devotion, although when they first met in 5th grade they made a lousy impression on each other.
But not for long. As they discovered they had the same passion for gothy, alt-rock giants Smashing Pumpkins and a hunger to make their own music, they melded together as friends. By seventh grade, they were inseparable.
"Our parents were concerned and even irritated at how much time we were spending together, and my mom would always tell me about how her best friends, when she was my age... She wasn't friends with them in her 20s. I don't think she was saying it to be mean but I think she wanted to prepare me for that," Seamans says.
"Oftentimes romantic relationships trump platonic relationships and we really want to show how important and supportive they are, and that's it's great to celebrate close friendships such as ours," Smith says.
Best Friends Forever songs are quirky, wordy, and occasionally absurd. When they're not about friendship, they tend to focus on Smith and Seamans' feelings or adventures. The group doesn't follow traditional pop song formulas. Their performances are unpolished. Tempos often shift mid-song and sometimes you can't tell if a verse is ending or a chorus is beginning. Early on they were even more rebellious as songwriters.
A more heartfelt declaration of love comes in the group's ridiculous, yet oddly touching song about our nation's 16th president. Smith had been reading Gore Vidal's fictional account of Abraham Lincoln's life and was extremely impressed by Lincoln the man.
The song is called "My Head in Front of Your Head" and it's becoming a teaching tool. A woman in New York somehow got hold of it and recommended it to a friend in France who teaches English as a second language. A teaching assistant at St. Paul's Highland High School heard it on The Current and brought it into her history class.
"I feel like our songs are pretty earnest and even though there's jokey parts, everything's pretty heartfelt," she says. "So I would hope it's a serious thing, but we're not taking ourselves really seriously."
"I think that they have enough wide-eyed enthusiasm and charm in what they do that you don't hold it against them. You don't feel manipulated," she says. "You feel like they're doing it so that you can all be in on the same kind of joke."
"Their songs are really well constructed," she says. "The melodies do stick with you, they do stay in your head. When you say 'Best Friends Forever,' I immediately start singing in my head, 'Eisenhower is the father of the Interstate Highway System,'" which is a song the group wrote after seeing that phrase at a highway rest stop on the way to a gig in Michigan.
Best Friends Forever is where it wants to be at this point. It's developing an audience in and outside Minnesota and is nearly finished with a new CD. Briana Smith says her only concern is that the work of this band based on friendship may start to interfere with the friendship. "I have to really struggle to be like, 'OK, let's not talk about band business. Let's just talk about our lives and our personal friendship,'" she says.
"Graduation (Friends Forever)" (also titled "Friends Forever (Graduation)") is a song by American pop singer Vitamin C, released as the third single from her self-titled debut studio album (1999) and is the final song on the record. Vitamin C wrote the song as a response to how many friends drift apart soon after graduation from high school. Josh Deutsch co-wrote the song with her and also produced the track alongside Garry Hughes. The song is partly orchestrated, featuring a string arrangement based on Pachelbel's Canon in D and a vocal appearance from the NYC All-City Chorus. One version of the song contains student interviews from the Class of 2000 of Lyndhurst High School in New Jersey.
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