BEST FRIENDS [Sat, 9-14-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—BEST FRIENDS [Sat, 9-14-24]

 

Not long before his death, a man told me that he was writing his memoirs. I had known him from all the way back in grade school days He said that in his memoirs he named me as his best friend. That made me sad. He deserved a better best friend.

I tried to be a good friend to him back then. We had quite a bit in common. But when we met, he was two years younger. There is a big gap between eight and ten years old. And he was immature even for eight. And in the years after, his maturity never seemed to catch up.

That was probably because he lived with his grandparents. Not for the usual reasons—single mother on drugs, dead parents, etc. It was just that his parents “needed” a childless life style. They both worked so could not care for him during the week. They were too tired on the weekends to drive a hundred miles to see their only child. So, as so often, grandparents.

His grandparents were good people. Good, old people. It had been a long time since they had raised their daughter, their only child. They treated Don both like a fellow oldster, and like a toddler. Which made him needy.

That neediness caused him glom onto me. I was embarrassed even to be seen with him. He was a little kid while I was a mature fifth grader. But I was the one kid who tried to treat him like a friend. Not that I wanted to. I wanted to hang out with older, cooler kids. I didn’t want to be seen with an eight-year-old who acted like a six-year-old. But I had learned from my mother, and from Mrs. Derringer, my Sunday School teacher at East Park Methodist in Indianapolis, that I was supposed to be nice to “the least of these.” So I became Don’s best friend.

He was not, however, my best friend.

BFFs are not necessarily mutual. I recall being struck by a conversation with a neighbor when I was recently retired. We were talking about our mutual respect for the local Catholic priest. “He’s my best friend,” AJ said. Then added, “But I’m not his best friend.” It was sad. It made me remember Don.

Don and I had kept in touch off and on for thirty years after high school. But stuff happens. Like geography. He lived all over the world. He settled on the west coast. We were in different school classes, so I didn’t see him at class reunions. He divorced and married again. I had never met his new wife. We had different lives. Another thirty years passed.

But after that conversation with AJ, I looked Don up. I was able to do it because of that new thing called the internet. He was a dying man. An unhappy, dying man. His parents left him all that money they had made without him to raise. A financial advisor had stolen from him the only thing he had gotten from that deal.

So, I reminded him of all the things we did together. Reading comic books. [I always had to wait for him before we could turn a page.] Playing basketball. [He was terrible.] Singing duets at church. [I was terrible.] Double dating [His date kept asking my date to switch places.]

“We had such great times together,” I said.

That’s what best friends do.

John Robert McFarland