"As you get older, it's hard to make friends," Mabel says. And besides, "anybody my age would be more infirm than me."

Indeed, aging can sometimes create barriers to new friendships: Hearing loss or the repetition that comes with memory loss can make conversation difficult; not having a driver's license can make it hard to get together; the need to be near a bathroom can keep people isolated in their houses. And to meet someone new at 90 is to realize that you've lived a whole lifetime the other person knows nothing about. Mabel jokes that there's no one to contradict her version of history, but she's also sad there's no friend left who shared the living of it.

Some people are cautious about making new friends precisely because they've already lost so many. When Jetta Hepworth first moved to a senior apartment at age 90, she made three friends. When they died, one after another, she decided she really didn't want to make any more new friends her age. "When you get to liking someone," she concluded, "they die."

Some people are naturally loners, and some have never outgrown the social awkwardness they felt at 6 or 16. But some people realize they can only survive all their other losses if they can share those heartaches, and their joys, with someone else.

Erma Dahlquist is only 76 but has already buried her husband and four of her five children, and two of her best friends died last summer. What has kept her going, she says, is the friends she has made at the Sunday Anderson Senior Center. "I'd be crying all the time," she says, "if I didn't have friends."

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When 91-year-old Donna Landes moved into the City Plaza senior apartments four years ago, it dawned on her that she was living on the same block where, 50 years before, she had worked as a nurse on the geriatric floor of the old county hospital. Now she was old and alone herself. "I was praying and fasting I would meet someone," Donna remembers. One day, after Donna had felt lonely for about a month, she was sitting in the lobby of City Plaza when Lydia Richards walked up and introduced herself.

Now Donna and Lydia are best friends. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, along with six other friends known as the Card Gang, they take the elevator down to the basement of the senior apartments, lay out an assortment of chocolates and cookies, put two decks of cards in the automatic shuffler, and settle in for an evening of Phase 10.

They play that game because the colors on the cards are easier to read than a normal deck, and Donna and another member of the Gang are legally blind. On a recent evening, Lydia and Donna giggled as Lydia helped her sort through each new hand.