Picking Your Friends

Picking Your Friends

          We all find and make friends in different ways and at different stages in life.  When we are babies, our mothers make choices for us.  These days it is most common for young mothers to join activities with their child that quickly lead to the forming of playgroups.  We all want our children to be socialized and not bound solely to the nuclear family and the cat.  So, these groups are, ostensibly, for the child to find friends, but what we can all see in action is an added attempt by the lonely house-bound mother to find like-minded and similarly confined women with whom she can relate.  I’m sure that something like this happens with Baby-daddies too, I am just not as familiar with that.  I will note that my older children’s mother remains tight with her original coterie of playgroup mothers to this day and long since the little birds have flown the coop.

          When we are in grade school we tend to have three or four groups of separate or overlapping friend circles.  There are the neighborhood friends, the school friends, the old playgroup friends, and possibly the summer camp friends.  We are, by that age, learning about different universes and the fun or folly of having one’s worlds collide.  Get a wider group of thee diverse friends together and they may well bond nicely, but they also might clique-up and resent one another.  Good to understand. Already, the parental influence is waning on friendships though we are, at this age, still at the mercy of Mom and Dad for vacations and where we spend much of our non-school time.  That means that friendship tensions are also starting to take shape.

          By high school, most kids are pretty independent.  I recently watched Stand by Me, the Rob Reiner movie about four twelve-year-old boys who spend two days one summer on an adventure.  The movie ends with the epitaph that, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.”  There is a poignancy and truth to that statement since those friends are the ones we came of age with, whether at eight, twelve or sixteen.  When we come of age we are implicitly recognizing that our friends are the ones we choose and not the ones we inherit from our parents, even if we choose ones that were introduced to us by our parents.

          By the time we are in college we not only make all our own friends, but we are forced to or choose to leave others behind.  It is a fact of life that it moves on and we move on and people move on and friendships move on.  Some people form their most lasting friendships at twelve, some do so during high school and yet I suspect most in this day and age make most of their lifelong friends in college.  College is organized with homecomings and reunions to foster those linkages and to help maintain them if you are a bit of slacker in that department. I have at least a dozen friends from college and yet only two from high school. It so happens I have no friends from before high school due to my family moving every two or three years.  That’s not to say I didn’t have local friends in those places, just not friends that I accumulated and keep in touch with.

          When I moved into the working world, the pattern of my life didn’t change much.  I did not stay put for long in one place.  Even though I worked at one bank for twenty-three years, I moved around within the bank and gathered friends here and there from each stop rather than having a group of friends who I worked with for years and years on end.  I find that inadvertently there are always one or two people I bond with in a given assignment and drag along as a friend after I depart.  Sometimes they know the other people I worked with or go off to work with and sometimes they don’t.  It makes for an interesting patchwork quilt of friendships, which is a diversity and mix I find that I enjoy.  I think that chameleon-like aspect of my persona with differing friends is one of the best aspects of me.  I am not an altogether person, in fact, I doubt I am at all different at the core, but I do have different personas based on the different environments in which I had to live.

          I am now a person without a “best friend”.  That is not entirely true since I consider my wife Kim to be my best friend and I consider my brother-in-law, Jeff, to be my best male friend.  Obviously I do not count my kids, all of whom are great friends as well as children to me.  The names that spring to mind in my list of close friends include people from every step along the path I have taken in my career and life that gets me to this spot, and they are too plentiful to list here and I would not do that for fear of forgetting someone who means more to me than my limited memory cells can recall when asked.  I do have an ex-best friend who I was very close to in college and for twenty five years beyond.  He and I were like brothers until we broke the golden rule of not mixing business with friendship.  Without going into the details, we had a falling-out that had less to do with money than it had to do with pride and emotions.  If you are going to lose a best friend, better for it to happen over something personal than something financial.  There was plenty of apology and forgiveness, but what is said is said and recorking all those feelings is impossible.  Once torn, such things are hard to mend.

          Increasingly, I use my Holiday Card List as my inventory of my friends.  I figure that if I am willing to reach out at least once a year to remind people that I am still alive and kicking and what I am generally up to, then they must be my friends.  There is absolutely no condition of reciprocity built into this.  I make a point to never record who has and hasn’t sent me a holiday card I don’t use that as a filter to edit my card list for next year.  I send the cards because these are people I want to stay in touch with and the Holiday Card is the most acceptable and common means of doing that.  I will note that I have also chosen to continue to send them in hardcopy by snail mail rather than do so digitally.  There is no conviction to that choice, but it gives me an excuse to retain my old handwriting skills.  I also note that I do send my address list off to the printing company so I do not need to either print labels or handwrite addresses.  I have an acquaintance (strangely enough, my father’s seventh and last wife) who remains on my list, but who has denigrated me for not entirely handwriting my holiday greetings.  Every year I marvel at her audacity even if she doesn’t mention it over again.

          I have been known to say that we can’t pick our family and sooner or later we can’t really pick our friends.  Our friends are our friends.  Life may cause us to drift apart or even unfriend one another, but those people who we share important parts of our life with are, by definition, our friends.  And it ceases to matter whether we like them or not any longer.  That may cause us to spend less time with them, but they will always be our friends.