WHERE ARE THE FRIENDS ? [R, 8-16-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—WHERE ARE THE FRIENDS ? [R, 8-16-23]

 

My heroes were loners. At least solitary, alone, even if not lonely. So why did I yearn for friends? I wanted to be the solitary solider of justice, but I also wanted someone to tell about it as we sat around the camp fire.

That’s probably not unusual, that pull between loneness and friendship, especially with men. We want to be The Lone Ranger… but even The LR had Tonto. At night, over a plate of beans, he could say, “Well, Tonto, I’m never going to get a radio show. Nobody even knows who I am. Every time I leave a town, they say, ‘Who was that masked man?’”

“Isn’t that the point of the mask, Kemosabe?”

I don’t blame Tonto for being snarky. After all, Tonto means fool or village idiot.

And this poor Indian friend had put up with being called fool, while he had to call The LR “faithful friend.” At least, that’s what The LR radio show said Kemosabe meant in Tonto’s native language. But I know better.

Tonto was a Potawatomi. I lived among them for several years in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, [yes, they got around] so I know that in Potawatomi, Kemosabe means “the one who knows nothing.”

Poor Tonto. He had to put up with playing second fiddle, but he got his digs in. “Friends” have to put up with a lot.

Maybe that’s why men today have so few, if any, friends. We want to be The LR, but to have friends, sometimes you have to be Tonto.

Even though my heroes were Lone Rangers, I wanted friends enough that I was glad to be a Tonto--the sidekick, the wingman, the guy who listened to the complaints and picked up the pieces, the guy who comforted the girl as she cried and said, “Who was that masked man?”

So, I have always been blessed with friends. I’ve sat around many campfires, listening to stories, eating beans.

I feel for all those men that the surveys and studies tell us have no friends, because they don’t know how to be a friend. That is apparently some sort of social trend leading to disaster. It seems strange to one who’s always had friends. Except…

…I understand better now what it means to live in a friendship desert, because I have fewer friends all the time. One of the shocks of old age is the loss of friends, especially long-time friends, people you’ve depended on for many years to be there. I recently listed all the friends I counted on to come to my funeral and say nice things about me but are now dead. Thirty-six. Might as well forget congregational singing at my send-off.  

It’s not just friends. Its doctors and plumbers and baristas, too. Those folks were young when we started paying them to keep us going, but now they use all that money we gave them in order to retire, and leave us scrambling to replace them.

Someone has said, It takes a lot of courage to be the last apple on the tree. I think it’s less a matter of courage and more having no choice.

I think I’ll start working the nursery at church so that I can make some friends who will outlive me.

John Robert McFarland