Friendship
Every Saturday and Sunday I catch up on all kinds of information sources I just didn’t get to over the course of a typically bandwidth hoovering week. Work and all it means to be a doctor who mans the front line in any specialty. Exercise, perhaps the most effective “medicine” when it comes to extending not just lifespan but more importantly, healthspan. News of the world; news from and about friends near and far.
Ah, friends.
Anyone who has spent any bit of time here inside this particular restless mind knows that friendship in all of its iterations and at all stages of life is a touchstone to which I return time and time again. You should know that I think about it every day, not just when I happen to be moved to write about it. I had a rare opportunity to play golf with 3 long-time friends on Friday. Since I hadn’t swung a club in about 6 months I went to a small indoor range to work out the kinks on Thursday. So much for good intentions; I pulled an intercostal muscle warming up and couldn’t make the tee time. My disappointment had nothing to do with the golf and everything to do with missing 4 hours with men whose friendship goes back 30 years.
Durable over decades or discovered last week, friendship in all its manifestations never fails to inspire. This morning my Sunday prompt came, as it so often does, from a random article in the Sunday paper titled the “A to Zed Project”. Six men, friends from boyhood and gathered at one of the group’s bachelor party, looked at each other with a shared realization that this first wedding in their closest circle was the first of many forces that would put pressure on this classic friendship.
That extraordinary insight was striking in a bunch of guys in their early to mid-20’s. Most of us just emerging from our college years were blissfully and soon to be painfully aware of our ignorance of how easily we made friends in the constant contact of school and all that came with it. We were surrounded by friend-making opportunities in class, in the locker room or backstage, and in the myriad non-career jobs we held down each summer. Admit it, you were just like me; you figured it would be like this forever. Yet here we have 6 buddies literally on the launch pads of adulthood who looked around and realized that they needed to do something to push them together as everything else (job, marriage, parenthood, geography) conspired to push them apart.
My Dad tried to warn me about this one summer. After my junior year in college during the one week my siblings and I were given to goof off after the last day of school and the first day or our summer jobs I told my folks I was headed to North Carolina for a beach week with college friends. Dad could think of nothing more foolish and frivolous, even before he heard the details of my travel plan (hitchhiking out, pretty much wing-it back). “These are not friends. 10 years from now you won’t have a single one of them in your address book.” Man, I kinda hated him for that as I stuck our my thumb on the Mass Pike, but sure enough when I turned 31 only one of the 10 or 12 guys in that house was still in touch.
Perhaps this tribe of Irish kids all had a Dad who preached the same gospel so they decided to do something to change how the story ended. “Why don’t we have a ‘bachelor party’ of our own every year?” They argued over how this would work and settled on getting together in a different city every year. Starting with Aberdeen they arrived on a Friday with only one thing scheduled, a fancy dinner (in mandatory black tie!) on Saturday night. The rest they just winged it. A roving bachelor party without the tawdry stuff, open to the adventure of discovery as they moved from pub to pub. Somewhere around “Q” they found less enjoyment in the pubs and more in the quiet comfort of each other’s company.
This past September, in an Airbnb in Zaragoza, Spain they completed their trip through the Alphabet.
Once upon a time Beth and I were out to dinner with another couple and mutual friends came up in conversation. They’d moved away a couple of years prior. Moved a couple of times, actually. “Have you heard from so-and-so?” “No. You?” “Uh uh.” “Huh. That’s funny. We thought maybe it was just us.” “Yah, I call every now and again. Text every so often. Crickets.” In an odd way it felt a bit better, for all four of us, that we weren’t the only ones who’d been left behind as it were. Better, but still a bit sad and still a bit hurt. We had expected the friendships to last.
Friendship is a bit of a journey. That’s not really news, though the journey evolves not only as one gets older but also in relation to societal evolution. T’was a time when the maintenance of a friendship forged on the battlefields of youth was almost expected to fade away, with only the faintest embers of memories still burning. It was natural. Same thing with friendships made during other natural “gathering places” like offsprings’ schools. Common to the point of being expected, especially if friends moved far afield.
What these preternaturally mature young men knew was in order to keep the fires of friendship burning you need to stoke them. We marvel at the long-distance friendships of our forebears, brought to light in the letters they sent to one another. Can you imagine? Friendship maintained at the whim of the postal service? And yet maintain they did, at least those friendships that were meaningful enough to make the effort. The dawn of the telephone age made it somewhat easier to do this, but expense was a barrier often too high to surmount, trumping the immediacy and intimacy of hearing a friend’s voice.
Friendships at the mercy of distance and time were friendships most often destined to become little more than memories.
Ah, but the world is so very different now. We have, each of us, a device that allows us to talk to anyone we have ever known, right now, for pennies. Some in the Irish 6 didn’t even have an email address. Now, a text can be sent with an effort so trivial that we have laws to regulate when we should know better than to fire one off. As if that’s not quite enough, Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp are there for the asking, and the original “reach out and touch someone” revolution that is email will alert you when someone has messaged you on either of them if you wish. It is now easy, the effort necessary to remain in contact is now so minimal, that what it means to stoke the flames of friendship has been turned on its head. Along the way it seems that our expectations of what will become of our friendships has changed as well.
We will have to re-order that, I think.
One of the Irish 6 described friendships as if they occupied the space inside a dart board. His 5 buddies were in the bullseye, sharing that special spot with no more than one of two others. Long time readers will recognize this as just another way to depict what I have called the friendship universe. In the very center is our home planet, the place where our dearest, closest friends, the people we count on and who count on us reside. Around this orbits our friendly acquaintances, that group we really enjoy and make a sincere effort to see but have no real expectations of the friendship beyond that. If you are lucky this is a fairly large group and if you are very lucky there is more movement from this group into the center than there is from the center out. Surrounding this little planetary system is a much larger group of acquaintances, which is in turn engulfed by people we’ve not met.
Beth and I have a number of friends with whom we shared many, many things, who have moved away from the little burgs we called home. In truth, most were little more than friendly acquaintances if we are being honest with ourselves; people we were thrown together with because of stage of life stuff like schools or sports or jobs. Turns out that Dad’s advice was not limited to friendships made in school. “Moving away” for these friendships is simply another way of saying the school calendar has flipped, and these fade just like friendships in the days of the Pony Express. That’s OK, too; they are meant to fade because most of them weren’t really friends, people in whom you confided, people who confided in you, counted on you.
Our new world of easy access to one another changes how we feel about people we really did consider friends when they move away. My Irish 6 intuited this and forged their contract to protect their friendships. It takes only time, well, time and desire, to stay in touch. To stay friends. Ah…there’s the rub, eh? It’s so easy now–no hoping that they will pick up the phone, return the voicemail, reply to the email/text/PM–that our expectations have changed. That resignation inherent in the historical timeline of all but the deepest, most meaningful friendships has been replaced with some kind of new expectation that we don’t have to let go, let the friendship go, simply because someone has gone somewhere else.
Dad would likely not have seen any distinction, by the way, between my early snail mail and rotary phone days and our present always-reachable world. Even young me would grudgingly admit that he would continue to be right.
And it hurts, doesn’t it, when friends who really were friends in person make it clear that moving away is actually just the same today as it was in the days of the letter and the rotary dial telephone. Those Irish lads looked around the table a couple of nights before the first nuptials in the group and sensed that this would be so. I think the ease with which we can be in contact might make it a bit more painful, to be honest. All but the truest of friends move on, and what we have now is not a gentle resignation and wistful sadness about our mutual loss, but rather a more acute and personal type, especially if we’d decided that the friendship had been worth the effort necessary to keep the fire burning.
There’s a story, the memory of which was triggered by my Sunday reading, but I won’t trouble you with it. You’ve got one too I’ll bet; only the details are different. There’s also a lesson I think, one that is grounded in the wisdom of yesteryear. Our world has changed, and continues to change, in ways that were unimaginable to our parents and grandparents. Heck, in ways that those Irish kids never could have imagined. Friendship, however, has not. It doesn’t matter even a little bit that it takes so little effort to connect in today’s world.
What matters now is the same as what mattered when connecting meant eagle feathers and inkwells: having a friendship that was meaningful enough to make the effort. Friends reach out, and they reach back when you reach out, whatever reaching means on any given day in any given era. You don’t need a grand event tied to the alphabet; all it takes is the reaching out.
Despite the ease with which we can do that, the arc of a friendship still ends most often as nothing more than warm memories, like the tiny embers of even the most magnificent bonfire in a dawn to come.
We are all happier when we accept that most of our friendships will still be like this. That most of us weren’t as wise as those six 20-something Irish lads. My Dad continues to be right, and I have long since forgiven him for this. Lucky are we to have even a single friend who feels just the same about our friendship, whether we stoke our fire in black tie standing side by side or bridging the cross-country divide on Zoom. Friendship was, is, and will always be about the desire to remain friends, not how easy it might be to express that desire. Remember this, and we steel ourselves a bit more against the sadness of a friendship lost to time and distance.
Remember this, and we can allow ourselves to be warmed by the memories that remain of the friendship that once was as we celebrate every friendship that still is.
I’ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2026 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.