Of Family and Friendships
There is an old expression which technically comes our way from Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird, when Atticus Finch says, “You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family.” I have said for a long time that I don’t find that expression 100% accurate. It is correct in its reference to family, but it is only half-correct when it comes to friends. Friends are perhaps sometimes chosen. I remember the story of my first wife, Mary, going to her first Mommy & Me class with our first child. There was a woman there who selectively chose the three or four other mommies with whom to form a play group. There were no resumes and no formal interviews, but there was a selection process for some form of like-mindedness. That gang of women spent the next eighteen years running the schools, the after-school programs and the community events to the best of their collective ability for the best like-minded outcomes they could obtain for them and their offspring. It was a mini-partisan process that was quite obvious and quite intentional. It did not look to push down others, but it sure did look to promote the gang’s self-interest. That gang is still as tight today as it was those thirty-six years ago. Such is the ways of the world, but, to this theme, such is the way of friendship.
There are many other instances when people are simply thrust together by circumstance and form a friendship that carries forward whether intended to or not. I had a young banking partner who was an extreme workaholic and ran our Tokyo office. He was single and so dedicated to his work that the combination of that ethic and the time zones had him at the office about eighteen hours out of each day. He had no social time so the only people (and especially women) that he met were those within twenty feet of him. Sure enough, he married his Japanese secretary, who was one of his only friends in Tokyo. That lasted maybe five years until he and she left Tokyo for London. That is a severe case, but we all certainly make friends with people at work where the universe of friendships is preordained by the organization structure. It’s not quite the expedition to Mars where you and five other teammates have to spend five years cooped up together, but there certainly is an external selection process of friendships that gets forced upon us.
And then there is the subject of this piece, which is that there are friendships which came to pass (whether truly selected, or involuntarily foisted upon us to some degree) and endure over the years and become old friendships mostly by virtue of longevity and shared experiences. I find that as I get older and older I have many of these friendships, which seems pretty normal. But I wonder whether others observe as I do that some of those friendships make more sense as time goes by and some make less sense. I imagine that in this time of polarizing political thoughts there are many friendships that cannot stand up to the strong dinnertime debates over whether Trump is an idiot who is ruining the country and should be impeached and ousted immediately versus Trump is the great white savior of the American way of life and any attempt to illegally overturn a “duly” processed election through a partisan coup attempt will be met with rancor and incivility bordering on full-on Second Amendment paramilitary activism. As I get older I get more liberal, which is the exception not the norm. That means that my old business friends in particular (generally all prone towards a high degree of at least financial conservativism) get redder while I get bluer. That may mean that this dilemma is more my fault than not.
While the politics of divisiveness is abundant these days, there are lesser aspects of aging and the passage of time that widen the divides in friendships. The easiest of these is mere distance. It does, indeed, make for less friendship connectivity. We don’t spend as much time with one another and we lose touch with each other’s values and concerns. We might also have more interactions than we like with a “friend” as the natural intertwining of friendship and business, as much as it is aptly warned against, inevitably occurs and brings about much more heartfelt angst than the college or early workforce events of “who ate my yoghurt in the fridge?” We are now talking about real dollars more often than not and real values.
I had a friend from banking that I brought into an investment twenty years ago and when good things began happening with the investment, he used what all bankers know to be a classic maneuver of using his position as a small guy in the deal to leverage himself into a better financial position directly at the expense of the rest of us investors. When I challenged him about it he said that he simply saw the situation differently than I did. That is not a definitive “I’m right and you’re wrong” because he did not have a moral leg to stand on. What he was saying was that his self-interest exceeded the value of our friendship or his sense of situational ethics. This was a double-whammy for me because my friends then turned to me and asked how I could have vouched for such a guy and inflicted this injury on the group. Double ouch.
And then there is the subject that people don’t like to admit, but some people age badly and get more and more difficult and testy. I have found that I have three such friends who are eightyish and share the common tragedy of having lost their spouses to cancers of different sorts, all too early. It is hard not to sympathize with that condition and while I do not know what it feels like, I can imagine that it might well turn a person sour to an extent. That sourness tends to manifest itself in the company of others, most noticeably to me when we are gathered as couples and a few older stags. I try to ignore those episodes, but when one of those guys calls me on this that or another things and gets demanding or snippy, it’s harder to not take it personally.
I was recently on a motorcycle trip where this happened and the difference between me and one of the offended parties was that I had a long relationship with Mr. Crotchety and they did not. I was more inclined to forgive and make allowances, not because they were deserved, but by virtue of a long friendship that seemed to demand more tolerance. That is the key, how tolerant are we able to be with old friends. It’s funny because we should be more tolerant as time passes, but our ability for tolerance is probably lessened by age as well, so who knows where it will go during any incident.
I also just had an ethical breach by another long-time friend. Some will say that there can be no tolerance with ethics, but as I have written before, I studied ethics and understand that the antinomian philosophy says that moral law has no bearing on grace and its dispensation. What does that mean to me? It means that friendship and forgiveness may be obligations of grace which extend beyond breaches of morality. That’s a lot to handle on a Monday morning so let’s leave it there. When it comes to family and friends, we just do what our hearts tell us to do.