"Doc Holliday: Because Wyatt Earp is my friend.
"Turkey Creek Jack Johnson: Friend? Hell, I got lots of friends.
"Doc Holliday: ...I don't."
-- TOMBSTONE (1993)
If we look seriously at things that really matter in life, which is what we're supposed to be doing here, we have to take a long look at friendship.
"Tombstone," quoted above for a purpose, is only one of hundreds of movies about friendship and what it means. At the risk of being sexist here, it seems to me that friendships -- particularly long-term ones dating back to childhood -- are more common among men than they are among women.
My three closest friendships in the world all date back at least 35 years. I've known my friend Tom, who lives in Colorado now, since 1965, the same year I met my best friend Mick. I met my friend Bill, who lives in Florida now, at community college in 1973.
There's a reason that our closest friends usually date back to childhood. It's when we're young that we have chance to build friendships, to nurture them and allow them to grow. It's when we're young that we can have misunderstandings that result in fights one day and by the next day everything is fine.
During the 1984 presidential campaign, my friend Mick and I had a serious disagreement over Ronald Reagan. Mick basically loved him, I pretty much despised him (Reagan, not Mick). I was living in St. Louis at the time and Mick was in California, but we generally talked on the phone a couple of times a week.
I was so frustrated at the fact that I couldn't get my friend to see what I considered the reality of the situation that we didn't talk at all for four months, but eventually we picked up where we left off and are still friends 24 years later.
The best opportunity I've had to make friends as an adult has come through my fantasy baseball league, with which I got involved in 1993 and became commissioner of in 1995.There are all sorts of baseball leagues, including plenty in which you never actually meet any of the people involved. But our league, which has been around since 1984, has really been something special.
I can honestly say it has made my life more enjoyable, and it has given me the opportunity to meet and get to know some of the nicest people I have ever known.
See the grinning guy on the left? I only see Bryce Wood one weekend a year, but I can honestly say I've never met anyone nicer. The guy just to his right, Mike Haskins, has become that rarest of creatures to me -- a good friend that I didn't meet until I was 45 years old.
As our league ages, there's plenty of psychodrama, and as commissioner I suppose I tend to let it bother me more than I should. But nine of the 10 guys in that picture, which was taken more than three years ago, are still in the league.
Seven of our 10 guys have been in the league at least 13 years.
With all the crap that's been going on in my life this year -- a lost job, my father dying and a host of other sad events -- I haven't been as good a friend to my friends this year as I have in the past.
I've gotten especially weird with my friend Mike Haskins. We haven't talked for about three months, and I had become convinced he was angry with me. So I didn't call for a while, and then it got to the point where it reminded me of girls I stopped calling when I was younger. There were times I wanted to call these girls, but it would have been too weird to explain why it had been so long.
"I was in a coma."
"I was out of the country."
As opposed to just the truthful one.
"I can be kind of an asshole."
The truth hurts.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment