Friendship

Soon I’ll leave for a brief trip back to Texas. I go most every month to see my father. Because I go so often now, the reality is I see friends from childhood more often than I see my friends here in Chapel Hill. This trip will be particularly festive since I’ll make a brief stop at my college alma mater for an evening with buddies from those days kind enough to make time for me.  I am grateful for these friendships that have lasted a lifetime and mournful that everyday life crowds out the time for friends in my own proverbial backyard.

For those of you who’ve not followed it, I highly recommend the Dear Sugars podcast. The podcast is over but the archives are available for free download.  You won’t regret any 20 minute interval you devote to listening to these two friends reflect on the complications their letter-writers describe. In one series of episodes, they describe the ways in which friendship is different most other relationships. In others, there are external forces that promote hanging-in-there when, however occasionally, frustration, anger, boredom, or any other negativity that finds a way in. With family, in addition to love, memories, and commitment, we are bound by law, blood, finances, and the rest of it. Webs deliberately hard to escape – a situation that gives us time to regain our appreciation for those we love and are committed to when our better angels get lost.  Likewise, at work, our employment may depend on being able to make relationships work with individuals we might otherwise run from. But friendship, whether we find it in the office, with our partners, in a high school class, a college dorm, or the neighbor next door, happens because we choose it.  Again and again, today and tomorrow, until we can’t or because we decide we won’t. In friendship we choose and are chosen even as we gradually, or sometimes all at once, allow those we call friends to know the good and the bad of all that we are.

Almost a month ago now, I received news that someone not quite a friend, but who ran in the circles I did in college had suddenly and inexplicably lost her beautiful, apparently healthy daughter. I have looked repeatedly at the posted picture, a picture so lovely and filled with hope that it seems impossible such a young woman could ever die. It is friends that are walking with this mother through this terrible valley. She has yet to stay alone or cook a meal. Her friends are listening to the stories, embracing her sobs, and holding her up as her feet struggle to find solid ground. And they are doing that because they choose to; there is nothing forcing them, no obligation, only the choice of friendship.

That beautiful picture of that beautiful girl that I never knew keeps reminding me that our life goes by so quickly and we are all so busy and it can all be taken away in a twinkling. But for this moment, I give thanks and praise for friends old and new, those I talk to every week, every month, and those I see once every few years. You know who you are.