“Friendship is nothing else than an accord
in all things human and divine, conjoined
with mutual goodwill and affection…with
the exception of wisdom, no better than this has
been given to men by the immortal gods…”
- Cicero: De Amicitia
(On Friendship)
Two old men sat on a bench in Federal Hill Park overlooking Baltimore Harbor. We hadn’t seen one another in a long time.
It was a temperate sunny day. Gazing over the city skyline, we slipped into quiet conversation. We didn’t look at each other much…We didn’t need to. We were together, and that’s what mattered.
Barriers to entry…
Men often have difficulty expressing affection for one another. We couch our fondness with good-natured teasing and storytelling, probing for resonance. It’s not as though a flash of insight is required to make a friend, but rather it’s an unconscious organic process that emerges from the simple pleasure of one another’s company. If given a little thought, there is an undercurrent of gratitude. We are, after all, social creatures. It’s just that our gender is often uncomfortable expressing our feelings.
Dave and I had long since passed that stage in our lives. There was still the bantering, but by now, we had no trouble letting each other know how much we loved and appreciated one another. There was freedom in that, and we knew it.
Decades earlier…
It began when we were youngsters in the military during the Vietnam era, and we couldn’t have been more different - like peas and corn. At the start, we weren’t too keen about one another either.
I was given to pontificating and as rudderless as a flat bottom boat. Dave was a no-nonsense fellow with an obvious internal fire. One might say he was an angry young man. In moments when expressing some sort of nonsense, he, with what might generously be called frank language, would suggest I was full of bovine excrement.
How we ever found a place with one another, is one of the great mysteries of the universe…but find it we did. Indeed, how any of us finds friends in the chaos of life, is beyond my understanding.
After the war, we lived together for the last year of military service. Somewhere in this time, and for reasons that are unclear, or at least in the telling, we adopted nicknames. I became Leonard, and he, the Indian. Labels in youth that remained to the day we sat on that March morning in Baltimore. Given names? What was the point?
That final year went quickly, after which we drifted into the slipstream of life, losing touch.
'Losing touch.' What a temporal expression.
Maybe we weren’t in regular contact with one another, but real friendships have little to do with ‘slipstreams,' time, gravity, tides, or shifting sands. They are about a touch of the heart. Once boys…now old men, the thread had never broken.
As youngsters, the future was waiting. Most of that future, by now, had become the past.
Back to the bench…
Overlooking the harbor that day, there was a little reminiscing about Vietnam, but it was a small part of the conversation. The bulk of our time was spent sharing gratitude for the lives we had lived and our good fortune to still be breathing in our late seventies…breathing long enough to be sitting on that bench on that sunny day.
We committed to meeting again later in the year, and recently we did. It was, as it had been in Baltimore, like it had been almost from the beginning…two souls not reconnecting, but simply plugging back in as if no distance nor time passed.
There is safety in deep friendship. The relationships are sacred, intimate, and cleansing.
I tell my students they will become a product of the five people with whom they spend most of their time. I tell them to look for folks who uplift and edify them. I have been fortunate to have had a small number of long-term friends who fit that category.
I’ll bet you do too.
