Old Friends

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What are you supposed to think about the steady menagerie of people who flow through your life? They stay a while, you make friends, you trade information and get vested in each other, maybe you have relationships, you help out with their problems, they weigh in on your issues ("Scott, you're weird"), you get bonded. You rarely, if ever, build a friendship thinking "well, I give this four to eight months..."

But then you always seem to drift. Your friends pull out ahead or fall behind, your connection becomes tenuous, they move away, or you don't have anything more to say, or you just get busy with your own life. Suddenly they're gone.

I'm typing at the park at Echo Lake, two blocks from my house, looking across the water, watching the last of the dusk fade into darkness, the friendly green glow of my Visor in front of me, the lights of the condos on the far shore reflecting across the water. It's pretty and darkening and reflective. In half an hour, there'll be stars.

Three houses back the park. I used to know the people in the third house, behind me where I sit. The mother was named Erin. I remember because when we first met, she introduced herself as "Erin, as in Erin go braugh". She had three kids, had spent her last years in Hawaii, which her insanely deep tan made seem plausible. She was thin and lithe and sexy, and her husband(? I assumed) was equally tan and short and built like a brick wall. A brick wall that went around bench pressing other brick walls to keep in shape. Hot couple. They had a dog as well, got as a puppy in the house on the lake, and they were raising it in the mother-in-law bottom of the house (renting). They also had a canoe, and cute kids.

Once she brought me a plate of thanksgiving food when I was out at the lake after my day's family festivities. I had just come out for a quiet moment, but she saw me and came out and we talked, and then she insisted on going in and bringing me food. We sat out by the lake chatting while I ate, sharing some time together, me collecting her stories. It was friendly and thoughtful and beautiful.

Now she and her family are gone. There's a yippy dog there now and who knows living in the basement. What do you make of that sort of passing friendship?

Perhaps because of the lake, but I'm thinking of everything in water terms tonight.

It's as if we're all caught in individual currents traveling life at different paces. When you cross someone else, you're friends (or enemies, I suppose). If your speed differential is big, you just glance off each other's lives. When the difference is slight, it takes forever for you to drift apart and you stay friends for a long time. When you find someone you really want to hang onto, you swim with or against the current to stay close to them in their current.

Are all the crossings just life's randomness? Personally, I can't yet buy into any grand plan. I cannot convince myself that you meet just the right people at just the right time for them to teach you something you needed to learn. So, I don't know what to think. There have been so many amazing people who I have no idea where they are now (Ian, Greg, John, Gwen, and on and on. Are they living the amazing lives I cannot help but envision them in?). The boring people that I've made efforts to ditch — did they end up with a new and better set of friends who they meld with perfectly and who find each other mutually fascinating?

Is it one long trial-and-error process to work through friends to maximize your friendship compatibility? I don't think it ever stops, either. My parents (drug-free!) have drifted through several sets of friends over the last couple of decades and who knows what before I can remember.

Is it unreasonable to expect some sort of consistency?

I think that's a big part of the appeal of love. You find someone in their own current and you cling to each other and suddenly aren't traveling downstream alone. Nice thought.

Because if you don't hang on, you get to a point where you can't find your old friends again. I tried to look up Rosemary about five years ago, only five years out of school. No chance at all. Didn't even come close to finding her. Not even with the power of the Internet.

I adore people who make the effort to stay in touch. G'bless T~, C~, J~, B~, etc. I am so happy to know what's going on with them, how they're feeling about life and how they're feeling.

Still, it seems unfair overall. Like the injustice of summer coming with weeds, why must time and the widening of experience come with loss?

Granted. That was miles from a deep thought. Just feeling the loss tonight.