Selfie credit: Dave
Visiting my old friend, Dave, after forty years, I found it both perfectly natural and utterly amazing how easily we reconnected. Nothing of the bond, nothing of the chemistry between us has changed—only our entire lives. A curious style of male friendship, not fan boy or man crush or biweekly poker player/bowler/golf buddy, this vintage affinity is my preferred mode of friendship, old friendship. Henry David Thoreau observed of society that “We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for one another” and that “less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communication.” Granted, forty years may seem an extreme interval, but for an introvert and a bit of a lackluster homebody like myself, it can take forty years to accrue new value or enough life worth talking about. We talked for four days. I trust I will see Dave again before another forty years pass, but if we don’t see one another, our bond and interaction would be the same at 105. I cannot feel friendship any more deeply or perfectly.
The great drawback of old friends is our age, more specifically, mortality. We lose old friends, one another, with increasing frequency. (R.I.P., Fabian) The ranks of old friends must inevitably thin, and new friends can never really replace them. An aged new friend (rare but possible) can become an old friend with sufficient time, but a young or a middle-aged friend can never become, and thus never replace, an old friend lost. Survive long enough and you run out of old friends. When the old friends are gone, it’s time to go.
