The Placement of Friendship

I’ve been thinking a great deal about friendship in recent days - recent months if the truth be told. I’m not alone. A surfeit of books is suddenly on the market parsing the intricacies of platonic intimacies - the how and the why and even something of the where. They are written by studied and erudite experts on the subject. I have very little to add...

...except the hunger. For friends.  

As noted in the prior blog, at the time of my Dad’s memorial service I enjoyed the banquet of reunion with a few precious friends from my youth. Independently, and then relationally we came to realize how formative had been these relationships, and how impoverished we would be without them - indeed, have become without them. Thus, the determination to reunite last week in Texas.

Appropriately, the first of those was a meal, around a borrowed table. And we ate - the food we had prepared, yes, but even moreso the feast of memory. Our wives indulged us the recapitulation. We had shared a lot of life together through those high school years.   We had much to relive.

I no longer recall the circumstances of our meeting, other than to say it must have been a shared classroom at school.  Both David and Eugene were smarter than me, but I managed to be just a good enough student to make it into the honors classes where they routinely lived.  It was - what?  Good luck?  C.S. Lewis once observed that, “We think we have chosen our peers.  In reality, a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting - any of these chances might have kept us apart.  But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances.”

We met, then, providentially.  I would have said that David and Eugene and I were inseparable throughout the season that was Cooper High School, but it turns out that while I was frequently distracted in the summers by selling ice cream on the streets of Abilene and going to church camp, the two of them were busy creating memories of their own.  But those are their stories to tell. As for the times when we were three, we took classes together, studied together, built outlandish projects together to satisfy the assignments of creative teachers determined to push and feed our own creativities. We recreated on film the lunar landing, utilizing Eugene’s garage and the pull-down steps to the attic. We built a paper mache raven roughly the size of a 5th grader who, if I recall correctly, spouted out phrases from Edgar Allen Poe via the tape recorder hidden inside. There was the snout we liberated from the fetal pig we were dissecting in honors biology that wound up suspended from the rear view mirror in Eugene’s car. Its continuing growth of hair was a constant amazement and amusement. Their were the school lunch hours spent at the home of one or another of us, nourished by homemade sandwiches made from the cheapest products we could find so as to save our lunch monies for more interesting expenditures.

And there was the music. David and I, both aspiring guitar players, listened endlessly to songs we wanted to play, scribbling down the words and picking out the chords.  Let’s just say that our resulting renditions were...close.  As we have recently listened afresh to crude recordings of those efforts, we’ve had to agree that we were pretty good - but not as good as we thought we were. The father of a classmate owned a Mexican food restaurant in town, and we found work playing their on weekends - $10 apiece per night, dinner, and tips (of which there were none) - despite the fact that we knew only one Mexican song. We had a blast, and even found our way into holiday marketing.

But college and the life beyond have a way of pushing the pieces in different directions on the game board.  We graduated from colleges in three different towns; grad school gave us little time for anything other than grad school, and getting married.  The waves of life rolled over us, and when we took the time to stand back up and look around, we were far apart, in more ways than one.

It’s a challenge, I have discovered, to reconnect from a distance.  Even when we manage to be in the same place at the same time, once the life news updates have been shared and the old stories retold, it’s time again to part.  We have a past together, but what about the present, to say nothing of some ineffable future.  Perhaps Lewis is on to something when he observes, “Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”  Like a paper mache raven, a moon landing in a garage, picking out chords to a song, or tossing a football in the yard after a cheap lunch.  Are living friendships only realistic, then, in close proximity?

Perhaps, but I am determined to disprove the premise.  God knows we have ample technologies available to bridge the distances.  At this stage of life, we have more flexibility with our time, a little extra money with which to travel, and perhaps most importantly, an annually escalating sense of urgency.

As for the absorption in some “common interest,” well, surely there is something out there.  We are honors class kids, after all, with experience at bringing to life the fruits of creative imagination.  Sure, some of them blew up - literally - but most were worth the effort.  

Like friendship, itself.