Friends

THROUGHOUT THE COURSE of my fifty eight year sojurn on earth I have had the great good fortune to have accumulated a great number of friends. This is somewhat surprising, in retrospect, because I have never put any great effort into friendship formation, from childhood through late middle age, having beeen, and still being content to pursue solitary vices and endeavors.

In america most friendhsip formation takes place in high school. I always tell high school students; beware! Makes your friends while you can! Never again will you have such a golden opportunity to spend every day with a large number of people your own age, with whom you have a great deal in common. Of course they don't listen, being unable to conceive of life beyond high school.

But its true; the older you get, the harder it is to make friends. You are set in your ways, less active, more inclined to enjoy the pleasant routines long established by years of habit. And then too, in america, the older you get, the more widely dispersed your friends are throughout the country, a precess which begins immediately after high school graduation.

But now we have the internet, and facebook, that golden opportunity to reconnect. Strange thing about facebook is that most americans seem to use it more to aquire hordes of new cyberspacial "friends" than to reconnect with ones with whom one has lost contact in the "real" world. go figure.

Like most americans my age, most of my oldest friends from youth are now scattered around the country, and I haven't actually seen them for years. Every once in awhile i renew contact with them, sometimes individually, sometimes in groups from our high school class of 1973. Its fun, and, in certain ways, quite revealing.

the first thing I noticed is how lazy people ae about writing email. Most of the time, communication consists of two or three perfunctory lines, hello, how are ya, good bye. Since I love to write, email , blogs, or anything else, my emails are always filled with fascinating information expressed in elegant prose. But what I get  back is usually either "good to hear from you"..or nothing....

rarely if ever do my friends and distant family members initiate communication with me. And when I initiate it..I get back....very little, if anything. And what I do get back is almost always a brief summary about what they are doing, and never do they show the least bit of curiosity, which i take to be interest, in me. Never any questions about my life, my activities, my thoughts, my  feelings.

No matter how long its been since we last saw each other or talked, even if its been more then twenty years; nary a word of interest in me. Only a few quick remarks about themselves, then, see ya later.

And I truly have no problem with this. Maybe they assume that I have done absolutely nothing worth reporting during the past twenty years, and maybe they are right. Maybe they simply don't care, or are afraid of seeming nosy. Or, maybe they are self absorbed, narcissistic, blindfolded americans, stuck in their own little world, uninterested in anyone else's, including mine.

MY sense is that the last theory is correct. After all, we are talking about americans. Sometimes I want to tell them" look, goof ball! I have a life! Its an inteesting life, at least to me, and since we have been friends for over fifty years, and haven't seen or talked to each other in ten years, perhaps you could at least feign some interest in me?

But I never say these things, I only think them. I am honest, but not that honest. I have no interest in forcing or shaming people, even old friends, into being interested in me. I am, and that's all that matters... to me.

And besides, I am not really interested in their lives either, and their lack of interest in mine affords me the perfect opportunity to cut short the emailing, avoid the pretense of feigned interest, and get back to what's really important to me; complaining about my oldest, and dearest friends.