Got word yesterday from an old friend that he’s retiring soon. I have a problem calling friends old. It’s not the chronological connotation that troubles me — I readily accept we are, all of us, getting older — but rather in the sense it means, “former; something from the past.” A kind of “that-was-then-this is-now” sentiment, as if to say, “He’s no longer my friend.” That leaves me feeling deeply melancholic, losing touch with the friends that shaped me, and me them, while we were all coming up. There’s a separate human emotion that captures this affliction and I don’t what it is, precisely. But it is.
I accept that geographic separation has a lot to do with this, as much or more even than does the child-childless fork in life’s road. “Oh, they’re pregnant with their first? Well, we’ll never see them again. Haha.” Still, people can and do stay in touch in a meaningful way even when separated by thousands of miles. I’m especially covetous of the accounts of old shoe boxes filled with letters inseparable friends exchanged with each other right up to the end.
I also accept that the different forks we take expose us to different people, places, relationships, opportunities. In a word: Experience. So much so in fact that friends on different forks may no longer recognize each other years on. Who wants to keep in contact with somebody he once knew who time and distance has transmogrified into somebody unrecognizable? “Remember? That guy we used to party with in the basement. Listening to Cheap Trick thunder away on the JBLs upstairs, draining a case of Rhinelander beer, he drove that beat up Valiant with the acrylic window on the rear door, he had to replace the glass because some jerk smashed it while parked downtown when we all went to that concert together — who was it again, Queen? Anyway, yeah, he moved away years ago. Somewhere on the west coast now. Don’t what happened to him, or when, but it seems like he kinda got radicalized.“
I admit that at certain times on my fork I’ve not stayed a good friend. In the way I presume I was at one time, where people I called friends genuinely enjoyed me and valued my companionship enough to say, “He’s my friend.” If I’ve lost that, and I feel I have, I’d like to have it back. I won’t say I’m ashamed of how experience — my experiences — have shaped me, but if those experiences have shaped me into somebody unrecognizable by old friends, I regret that.
Intellectually, I understand the fragility of relationships, how separation and dissimilar experiences may fracture them, but whatever it was that held us together in the basement so many years ago, idling away the hours of humid summer days, unsure of ourselves and what fork we’d eventually end up on, whatever glue that was, I’m sure of one thing: We were, all of us back then, friends.