One of the consolations of aging (yes, there are consolations chief among them waking up each morning on this side of the grass) is that the longer you live the longer you get to enjoy those friendships formed in your youth, the ones that satisfy, entertain, support. And they become more valuable, but that only happens if you cared and conserved those bonds, those intimate yet stalwart associations framing good and bad days, times of need and times of largesse. I hope my readers are lucky enough to have old friends, to know this treasure of joys and sympathies.
Among those still in my usually metaphorical but occasionally clumsily physical embrace are Harvey and Gary. Harve first met me at age 13 when I moved into his neighborhood and we realized that our nativities had occurred only three days apart in December 1951; I’m the elder but at 73 years and counting what’s 72 hours between friends? When we talk, there is no strangeness from distance of miles or months since we last saw each other. Our conversation blends easy familiarity and undying regard of old friends beneath horrible puns and hilarious remembrances.
Gary met me at 13 as well and as constant companions, we engaged in games of basketball, gin rummy, and small town misbehavior. The last of those meant that we didn’t see each other for years. But when we eventually found our way back into each other’s lives, the redemption from a long silence carried the rewards of of connecting again with all the memories from those days.
There’s something about that age of 13 and old friends for me. That September I started a new school, all male, Jesuit run: Jersey City’s St. Peter’s Prep, sixty miles away from that new home, in a vibrant but run down ‘inner city’ before that term was coined. Such circumstances proved a laboratory for new friendships where each of the freshmen experimented to see who might match in personality in a way that both parties wished to cultivate. The tests (I had to use that word in this through different activities like the track team, intramural basketball, or cramming for a Latin exam . Such experiments continued throughout the rest of my early life yielding the old friends I met the first day of college in 1969, the bosom buddies who taught with me at my first job in a reform school in the mid-1970s, the theater people, the women met through jobs and other experiences whom I figured out might be the most valuable old friends of all. (You know who you are, Peg, Sally, Carol, Heather, Irene, Yvette, Laura, and, of course, Marjorie — these names are just for starters because I don’t want to get anybody mad)
What these associations all have in common despite those different beginnings is the care and confidence that we had and have in each other, a sense of support that bolsters. There’s also an honesty that educates and on the best occasions reforms us. Old friends can tell you that things will get better, but there’s more to you than you imagine, that you need to get back in the game. They can also be very clear that you need to cut the crap, tone it down, and stop fooling yourself. That last one is perhaps the most important thing these figures do because as Richard Feynman once said you are the easiest one to fool. It’s much harder to kid those who knew us when, who have hobnobbed with the earlier rougher versions of ourselves. The meaning of an old friend in your life unfortunately unfolds fully when you lose one to death. Their absence is a hole in your life that cannot be patched or filled.
This appreciation of old friends surfaced sharply in my mind as I skittered about Paris this week. The musing on the topic arose not just because many of those in my lucky constellation texted me about this or that restaurant or how the Mets were doing or the latest news of our families. It also came about as we commiserated on the craziness of the world right now. And those messages overlapped with the way in which Paris is filled with reminders of Franco-American friendship. They’re everywhere. And France is an old friend of both of the two countries where I can boast citizenship: the United States and Ireland.
The same reminders were present the previous week in London. Yes, like many powerful comradeships there was a big fight or two in that history, but we got over it. Even the Irish part of me has to agree that the English are old friends, the kind we occasionally have to tell the cut the crap. Understanding how our countries have stood with each other against existential threats made me think that while politics is the pursuit of interests to ensure our survival, friendship is as C.S. Lewis once wrote “one of those things which give value to survival .” The tactics currently ricocheting around the world aren’t even likely to help us survive or thrive, but regardless of their merit they are not what you do with old friends.
I don’t know anyone who disagrees with my prizing of old friends. But that’s because my circle is blessed with these relationships. Have the members of the current administration who seem not to care or even understand how important it is to have old friends ever managed to cultivate such relationships in their own lives? Is everything transactional? What a horrible thought. That those currently playing arsonist with our connections to other countries know no-one in their own life who joyously celebrates their wins and steadfastly props them up after their losses would explain a lot. But surely someone there must remember the lessons taught by sages even from the earliest times of a Western culture that they claim to be defending:
- Aeschylus: “I was taught to hate those who desert their friends and there is no infamy I more despise”
- Euripides “Whoever wishes to have honor or strength instead of good friends, reckons badly”
- Epicurus “Of the things which wisdom provides for happiness throughout life, the greatest by far is the possession of friends”)
Maybe those now so zealous for some early version of Catholicism to guide governmental actions should go back and read their Thomas Aquinas who observed in the Summa Theologiae: “The happy man in this life needs friends. … He does good to them, he delights in seeing them do good, and in turn they help him and do good to him.”
They appear to be oriented opposite these ancient fragments of advice. Their way of operating with people in countries cannot “conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance ” as Jamelle Bouie wrote today. With all the old friends I know and that includes observations of the tight decades long connections that others enjoy status is banished and there is equality established no matter how the personal circumstances of the parties might rise or fall. You don’t keep old friends because you hope to get something out of them. Nourishing those relationships happens without expectations of returns.
Old friends will be there for you no matter what stupid thing you have done this time. Watching someone mistreating old friend is embarrassing, stomach turning. To be in Europe amongst people who looked up to us and cared for us while such stupidity spills out of our White House sharpens the shame. This is not how we treat old friends. It’s not too late to turn this around. There is a capacity for repair even forgiveness in old friends. What we should do so before these companions in life get to the point where the wisdom they adopt is from another old philosopher, Joey Adams who was the first to note
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
