I was walking in the woods earlier this week when a thought floated through my head.
I’m a good friend.
That’s it.
Simple. Random. Kind.
A bit self-congratulatory. Narcissistic even. Though it was less the ossifying of an idea into concrete words that has stayed with me, and more about the sensation that came with it. It felt like a hug from a good friend. Something equal parts belonging and self-assuring, both giving and receiving between myself and my friends, and between myself and myself.
Are we in a nebulous cloud of poetics now? Yes, yes we are. And that’s exactly how friendship has always felt to me. It’s either murky and hard to see what’s what, or the connection is so deeply understood that describing it is as futile as trying to hold a cumulous in your hand. Sometimes it’s both.
I’ve never been married and I don’t have kids, but I know from watching others do it that those types of relationships can be really hard. And yet they seem to have stronger guidelines of how they work. An individual generally doesn’t have different types of marriages the way you have different types of friendships—your relationship to your kids are different, I’ve seen this, but the blood bond is something altogether different than the friendship bond between strangers. Which is effectively what friendship is, a trust and a promise between two people who don’t really owe each other a thing, and yet they give and share.
I’m thinking now of David Whyte’s meditation on friendship in his book of consolations in which he settles on a singular lasting anchor: a friend exists to witness. I gave this book, with a saccharine inscription, of course, to a very dear friend last summer (a classic Amy gift) with an emphasis on witnessing. We are at our best when we don’t judge the other, when we don’t try to bend or pull them to meet our own needs or fit our ideas about who they should be, but simply stand in silence before whatever version of themselves we coexist with in the moment. If we’re really generous, we stand in awe of who they are and who they are becoming. When it’s a right fit, we are rewarded with a mirror, even if only for a moment.
This same friend I gave the book to recently told me that my distinct writing voice is “sour and honeysuckle” and now I have to rename this publication. Just to keep you up to date.
I am a particular person.
I am difficult.
And I’d like to go ahead and get this part out of the way, because I am truly grateful for all the friends who have flexed and flowed alongside my many bends and rocky banks. I like things a certain way, but sometimes I’m loosey goosey. I haven’t always been good at honoring my own energetic limitations, so they tend to pop up like a grumpy neighbor’s dead, bloated pet on a tranquil neighborhood street. Everything’s fine and then, surprise and disgust and a little less caring because it was the grumpy neighbor after all, not the easy one.
A college professor once told me that I like being difficult. This is untrue. Though I did enjoy challenging him. Maybe he was flirting when he said that. I wouldn’t know it. Anyway, it’s just that I’ve always tried to go along in the way people want me to go along, and yet, I can’t help being anyone other than myself, a person who has historically stayed too long at the proverbial party. Now that I’m closing in on one hundred years old, I’m a little better at anticipating my limitations before they become problematic. Maybe. I’m definitely better at saying “no” before things have a chance to get to the critical point. I have changed. But I wouldn’t bet an acorn hat that my friends see me any different.
The truth is, I don’t think I’ve always been a good friend. I don’t think I’ve ever been *quite* good enough in most scenarios. Work, play (again, grumpy), friendship, family, art. I can always see how I could be better without realizing that everyone is never really going to be *that* much better. Not as long as we’re human. (Yes, I’m exhausted with this story). But there are always moments when each of us really could have been better.
There are things that still haunt me, even though I was hardly a teenager at the time. And there are breakups that I’ve been on the receiving end of that felt so confusing and wrong, but ultimately did me a favor. If they want to leave, you gotta let them go, and you’re probably better for it. But I’ve also left impossible situations that made me feel so icky I didn’t know what else to do but Irish goodbye into the darkness of wooded night. (Are we still allowed to say Irish goodbye or is that cultural appropriation now?)
Last weekend I traveled to visit a great friend from high school who I haven’t seen in roughly 15 years. We’ve known each other for more than 30 years, which makes me feel some kind of way, like when you have a gas pain and have to massage your belly through the cramp, but then you pass a spectacular fart and feel both intense relief and pride. That’s what it feels like to be old enough to have a bond dating back to 1990. I’m this old, and probably why I dreamed the other night that a quarter of my hair suddenly turned gray. It wasn’t even the color that startled me—I have zero interest in reverse aging—it was that I just kept running my fingers through it, muttering, But it’s so dry. It’s SO DRY!
I’ve mentioned two different friendships now, and I can think of at least a couple more that orbit my moon. Some of them pass every week, some once a solstice, others in a generation. And I still have as many questions as I do answers about how all this friendship stuff works.
What’s the secret? Well, you gotta have chemistry, right? Sometimes polar opposites attract, like the positive and negative ends of two magnets. Curiosity about each other’s differences keeps it interesting. Humor is a non-negotiable. When you can make each other laugh it’s a lot easier to put up with each other’s bullshit. That I’m funny is (at least part of) my saving grace. But more powerful than that is the willingness to forgive quickly, to acknowledge the offenses when they occur, to apologize when needed, and to use the fire to move the engine down the track.
The friend I saw last weekend was a housemate for 18 months in college, then we had a falling out and didn’t speak for about six months. She left a goat head in the freezer when she moved and I threw it away. There was no room for ice cream. We laugh about that now. Though I think we were both lacking in maturity at the time to navigate that situation more smoothly. We are very different in personality, but there are few people on the planet I can laugh that hard with, just absolutely ridiculously silly, and I know if I needed her, she would show up. I hope she knows I would do the same. Maybe I wasn’t always so reliable, and that scratches at my soul, but we can get better.
So you also need an equal give and take. You gotta have balance. Maybe not regular, like one of you may have a crisis that lasts a month or seven years while the other one has yet to land in her pile of shit. Or you might cycle through one in a single day. The giving, most of the time, is also the receiving.
This is starting to feel like a tutorial, which is not what I intended at all. I only wanted to talk about how great my re-union was last weekend and how we hiked in the Great Smokey Mountains and saw a bear and her cub and morel mushrooms growing wild off the trail and how many times I peed in the woods and how I’m still sore from that one hard hike and how we laughed the entire time and were probably annoying with all our inside jokes but who cares. We were laughing.
In times like these, we were laughing.
We hadn’t spoken on the phone for nearly as long as we’d seen each other. And only very few occasional texts and emails over the years. As far as the story of us goes, we kind of didn’t know each other for a long, long while. Proof that even when you change, you never really change, because there were zero surprises when she opened the front door of a house I’d never laid eyes on in a town I didn’t know existed until she was there, and I walked in. Like it was last week.
Serendipity exists to guide us. She’d reached out last December, around Christmas, seemingly randomly, and I had just lost my job and decided to leave New Orleans, and was going to be living much closer to her. Everything in my life was changing very, very fast. We chatted about a visit for a while, but then it was last weekend, those specific dates, despite a packed schedule and work load on my end and other life/family/world stuff, that I felt pulled to go, and so within two weeks, I went.
When I got home from my trip I noticed something unexpected. Not only did I feel buoyant and light (and not just because of the stool softeners my friend’s mother gave me, which really altered a staid reality for my poor aging bod), but I felt especially grounded. And I felt really, really loved. And then I watched that love radiate out toward others. That’s what I didn’t expect. The butterfly effect of being in the company of someone who I’m connected to on levels I cannot even name.
It’s the butterfly effect of friendship. And if this essay has made you think of anyone in particular, or a few anyones, text them right now. Call them. Send an email or write a letter. Tell them you love them.
That sappy shit really does make a difference.
I got so inspired over the simplicity of a good, silly joke and the strength of a good friendship last weekend that I made a wee sentimental design and put it on a T-shirt (in three colors) and a mug.
Are you a good friend? I bet you are, and I bet you know one. So if you feel inspired by my inspiredness, grab one. Gift it. Hoard it. Be the good friend.
Check out the “Good Friend” t-shirt and mug in the new Rude but Charming Annex.
absolute love how it maxe me feel and think
❤️