Until I moved to a purple state, I'd never been friends with a Republican.

Sure, I'd known they existed, had even interacted with a number of them--but true, deep-down, connecting friendship in which you could call that person at any hour of day or night and wail and gnash your teeth for no reason whatsoever? No way.

That shouldn't be as strange as it sounds: we're all products of our environment, and I grew up in a true-blue progressive family in a primarily progressive town in a vastly progressive state. The easiest way to make a Groff apoplectic is to turn on Fox News or read from the Regan Handbook. I attended the most liberal of liberal arts colleges--there were a few furious iconoclasts, but they were easily ignored--where there was no real on-campus social activism because, well, we'd be preaching to the choir, and the choir by then had had enough preaching, thankyouverymuch. After college, I lived in liberal enclaves of university towns: Philadelphia, Palo Alto, Madison.

I think when you surround yourself with people who are kind, gentle, generous, thoughtful, well-informed and intelligent, and those people also happen to hold the same views as you, you tend to think all people who have those views are kind, gentle, etc. And, conversely, to demonize others who hold opposite views. How could they be good when they believe so many wrong things? Aren't political beliefs a fundamental indicator of the person within?

So when we sailed into Florida, especially into Gainesville (yet another university town) I assumed I'd be making the same friends as usual. I began to meet three times a week at dawn with a group of ladies from my antique little area of Gainesville, and we'd go off for a five-mile run, chatting happily all the way.

It was only a few months in, after a tart comment on my part about reproductive rights, when I realized there was an awkward silence hanging over two of my ladies. One of my friends--far more liberal than I am--took the ball and ran with it while the other two exchanged glances, slightly chagrined, and soon changed the subject.

That's when I learned that those two, whom I'd come to adore, were not only Republican, they were very, very conservative. They're phenomenal mothers, caring and smart and generous, absolutely people I could call if things went drastically wrong in the night. And what surprised me wasn't that I liked them, but how I could ever have thought I wouldn't have. I, who had prided myself on being open-minded, was surprised to find it had been closed tight against people like them all along.

As one running buddy, Cindy, (a fiscal conservative if I've ever met one) says very reasonably when we disagree, "We all want the same things. Our methods of getting those things are just different."

She's right. We all want a clean, prosperous, happy life and a good world to live it in. And friendship means that you can have severe differences of opinion and still love the other person dearly.

That doesn't mean that I won't try to inform them better when I can--who can resist proselytizing?--but I probably won't be bothered when they try to sneak in some of their own. Heck, they probably won't change my mind, but listening, what a good friend does, never hurt anyone.