Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

I think about friendship a lot. Over the past couple of months I’ve experienced a huge slice of what we could think of as the contents of a desktop folder marked “friendship”. Good friends close by. Close friends a goodly distance away. Old friendships rekindled and newer ones revisited. And both, not, as well. Friends lost along the way glimpsed ever so slightly, reminding me that they, too, were once in at least one of my many circles of friendship. Perhaps the only classic friendship experience I’ve not had recently is the tragedy of losing a friend for whatever reason and by whatever route.

Big sigh of relief about that.

Beth and I are fairly well known as people who never consciously leave a friend or a friendship behind. It always makes us feel good when someone mentions that about us. As an aside, it’s always nice when folks you like think about you, or the version of you, that you like best, the same way that you do. Autumn is travel season for me. It seems as though we always find a reason to go somewhere or do something fun around this time. This year brought an epic family wedding in Maine; we are quite good friends with my siblings and their spouses. We would hang out with them all the time if we lived in the same area. It’s also the busiest time on my professional calendar. My biggest annual meeting was in Chicago this year. A couple dozen of my professional friends would be my very closest friends if only we lived closer to one another.

Unlike most times when I sit down to muse, especially if I’ve settle on a topic, I’m kinda all over the map on this one today. There’s so much to the topic, you know? Do I go back to the well on friendship levels? How important it is to have close friends close by as you get older, especially if you are a male? How about the important logistical details of a friendship and the mechanics of keeping it alive? All deeply important sub-topics for me, ones that I really enjoy exploring. I think I’ll fall back on my time-tested “Sunday musings…” strategy and ride the thought train that pulled into the station–my dining room table, that is–along with the weekend newspapers, courtesy of the columnist Rich Cohen:

How do you make a friend in the first place? How do you make a BEST friend?

Cohen’s article is titled “Luck of the Draw”. Sometimes you get born lucky. My folks presented me with a best friend when my brother Randy arrived, eventually to become my roommate for some 20 or so years. Cohen is thinking outside the family home as he compares and contrasts his experience as a freshman at Tulane with that of his son. Cohen senior had what anyone older than 40 would recognize as move in day as a college freshman: you discover who your freshman roommate is when the two of you walk into your room for the first time. “Hi, I’m Rich.” Contrast this with his son Nate who used social media to “curate” the process of “discovering” that freshman roommate: “Hey, I’m @Nate and I see you’re going to Faber, too.”

Cohen the Dad ended up with a close friend he seemingly found inconceivable in retrospect, so different were they in so many ways, while Cohen the son has chosen, and been chosen by, a carefully vetted doppelgänger. Rich had experiences with his roommate and the roommate’s buddies that he, Cohen, found unimaginable in retrospect. Will Nate’s experience be similar?

I guess lesson number one in Making a Friend 101 might be something along the line of “take a chance”. If you are in the middle of an experience that we could think of as uncurated, take a chance on the person who says “hi” back. Beth and I started a conversation with the couple who set up their beach chairs next to us on the first full day of our honeymoon, launching us on an epic week at “Camp for big Kids” in Jamaica. We are close friends with Dave and Suzi to this day. This winter we pulled off a pretty spontaneous weekend together on a beach far south of either of our homes. Our only regret is that none of us remember the rugby songs we sang in the swim up pool bar in Jamaica.

Outside of my family my very best friends arrived in similar, unplanned circumstances. Rob was introduced to me 2 weeks before we headed off to preseason football camp. Sadly, we weren’t roommates. Heck, we weren’t even in the same part of campus, let alone the same dorm. In a similar vein, Bill and Nancy are the couple version of our best friends. We have that wonderful friendship where husbands and wives like both husbands and wives. Beth and I met Bill and Nancy in graduate school, and as is the pattern in our particular world we went our separate ways for post-grad positions. It was the luck of the draw that landed us both in the same city some 30 years ago, a totally unplanned opportunity dropped in our laps and just sitting there waiting for us to take the reigns.

And there lies the second secret to making a friend: when a new friendship shows up, like a perfect horse all tacked up and ready to go, for goodness sake hop in the saddle! Take that friendship out for a ride. See where it takes you. Where you’d like to take it. Not every friendship can, or should, become a best friend or even a close friend, but who among us doesn’t have room for a new good friend or two. Or three. Some friendships are pretty easy, at least in the beginning. Kinda like a well-trained horse that doesn’t need a whole lot of riding, guidance, to give you a nice ride when you meet. But the best rides, like the best friendships, come from the effort you make to learn what kind of friend you can be. Where is the commonality, those areas where everything is in sync? What do you need to work on to keep the friendship growing?

I guess that’s it then. Sometimes I just need to sit down and start writing and what I was really thinking about just sort of finds its way onto the page. Friendship is equal parts serendipity and recognition that, you know, you’ve got a chance. Taking that chance, risking the possibility that you simply met an acquaintance but taking a chance and seeing if you’d both like to ride along in the same direction for a bit. Doing the stuff it takes to learn about your new friend and letting them learn about you. After that, who knows?

It’s been a busy Fall, like usual. I’ve spent time with friends older and newer, at home and away, and it’s been simply wonderful. What’s in store for me and my friends? For me and for Beth and the friends we have together? We are young yet. Might we be fortunate enough to expand our circles of friends? Heck if I know. We never let go of a friendship. Never leave a friend behind. Still, why not “take a chance”? You know, the luck of the draw. Perhaps a new friend.

You can never have too many friends.

I’ll see you next week…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 17th, 2024 at 8:09 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.