I sent a text a few days ago that said, “So we’re both still alive, right?”
It went to a man I sat beside for fifteen years at a depressing office in downtown Minden. I sent it because I couldn’t remember the last time we’d spoken, and when I tried to count backward, the best I could do was a year. Might have been longer.
He took a while to answer. “I guess I am. Are you?”
The first few messages were careful. By the fifteenth we were insulting each other about movies, the way we’d done every day for a decade and a half.
Emerson wrote in his journal that it is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
Every one of those check-ins over the years came from him. He reached out. I answered, and I was glad to hear from him every time, though never glad enough to be the one who started it. Then I’d put the phone down and not think about him again until his name showed up on its own.
We called each other brothers for fifteen years. I’ve said that word ever since without ever checking whether I earned it.
There’s a movie I have watched more times than I should admit. George Clooney plays a man who fires people for a living and spends three hundred days a year in airports. In his other life he gives a motivational speech asking the audience to imagine loading everything they own into a backpack, then everyone they know on top of it. The weight is the point. People are the heaviest thing in the bag, and his advice is to burn it.
For a long time I took that to be the smart half of the movie. I figured the ending, where he comes around, was tacked on so the audience would leave feeling better.
I had two best friends in high school. There was never a fight, and nothing happened at all, which is the part that bothers me. I took a different job, they took different jobs, one of them moved away.
One coaches at a school in another parish now. I see him at ball games two or three times a year, where we say the things people say at ball games. Last year I saw the other one across a parking lot and turned and went the other way. My wife watched me do it and asked why, and I stood there working on an answer that never came.
My wife tells me she doesn’t make friends easily. Says she feels left out sometimes. She also has three friends from high school who have gotten together every few months for thirty years, and whatever thirty years does to a person has happened to each of them in full view of the other three.
When she gets home I ask what they said about me. She tells me they never talk about me. She’s lying.
I’m not an easy man to be friends with. I don’t hunt or fish. Somebody asked me once whether I preferred a fiberglass boat or an aluminum one, and I had nothing to give him. Nothing wrong with any of it. Half the men I admire most in this parish can talk about deer corn until the sun comes up.
What I can do is talk about a movie for two hours, or a book, or an argument about how this country ought to be run that goes deeper than deciding a man is wrong because of the letter beside his name. That last one gets harder to find every year. The pool of people I can be entirely myself around was never large to begin with.
Thoreau wrote that the only danger in friendship is that it will end.
I had a friend in college who never got the chance to test that. I was at my first job out of school when the phone rang. It was my old adviser, a man who’s still my friend, who taught my oldest daughter and may yet teach my youngest, which is a strange sentence to be able to write. He told me my friend had died. A heart condition nobody knew about, including him.
I’ve thought about that man nearly every year since. And I wonder sometimes whether I remember him so warmly because we never got the chance to drift. He’s perfect in my head, and he had help. He never took a job in another town or stopped answering the phone, because he didn’t live long enough to. Everyone else I let go of turned slowly into somebody I lost track of. He was spared that.
People drift. Jobs change. Children arrive, and a week stops holding what it used to. If you’ve let a friendship go quiet, I’m not standing on any ground I could point a finger from. I let two of them go without so much as a cross word, and I let a third one do all the work for years while I told myself we were close.
My mistake was in what I did with that. I decided drifting was natural, and that natural meant nothing was required of me. Easier is the honest word. Clooney’s character burns the backpack because it’s heavy, and he has the weight exactly right and the conclusion exactly backward.
Late in that movie he talks a nervous groom out of walking away from his own wedding. He does it by asking whether the best moments of the man’s life happened while he was alone. Then: “Life’s better with company.”
I don’t know what got into me the day I sent that text. He answered, though. We’re talking about movies again, and that’s more than I had a week ago.
Josh Beavers is an award-winning columnist. He traded the newsroom for the classroom in 2014.