Rings of Friends, Webs of Friends

A meditation on friendship

With old friends from Illinois, in Illinois — not too long ago but long enough ago that my hair was dark.

Friends come in so many forms. How many of us have one best friend? Fewer and fewer as we get older, I suspect.

To clarify what I wrote last week, I do have some best friends whom I love dearly. Just not that one best friend that I had at times when I was younger. There’s something special about that one — but although I miss having one best friend, is it really the best way? You may know by now how I answer that; it isn’t ideal to rely so hard on one person. For one thing, she might die.

It’s not just about death. No one can be that perfect puzzle piece that fits neatly into all our corners and curves. One friend might fit that tucked-away corner, another might round out a more obvious curve. It takes a village to be a friend. We evolved to have that village, and once upon a time, everyone did. Now, anyone who has it should count themselves lucky.

Speaking of luck, as I often do, I’ve had my share of it with friends. None of them fit all the puzzle pieces, even the best of them.

Mary Grace was my top best friend for years, starting in junior high, and decades after her death she’s still some kind of guiding force in my life. Yet I was often torn between loyalty to her, which meant attending to her perceptions of slights and her dark moods, and my own desire to hang out with our group of friends and have fun. Reading my old diaries recently took me back to that fraught time. Of course, everything is more dramatic when you’re a teenager, but Mary could get into those states later in life, too. I don’t know if they would have persisted into old age, because she never got there.

Another friend from that time who lived, Susan, holds a dear place in my heart; we became closer through the years and went through some crazy shit together. Only she will know what I mean by that, and that’s the way it will remain.

Now, Susan lives an hour’s drive from me — but that’s only if there’s no traffic, and you have to go down the worst freeway in the Bay Area to get there, and I don’t see her nearly enough. Still, it’s good to know she’s there. It’s good to see her when I do. Very good.

I have other friends I see more often. Like Bill, another close friend from high school, now with a wife and grown child. I was so happy when they moved here, in walking distance from us. Proximity helps, and it’s tough to find that in a large metropolitan area.

Not everyone has old friends like these.

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I’m not naming any friends I’ve made since high school. There are too many to name, and knowing me, I’d get distracted by some shiny object and forget to name some important one. You know who you are.

I’ve been lucky with old friends and lucky with new friends. I’ve been lucky to meet great friends at work. I’ve never encountered so many of my people at a job as I did in the 1990s at HarperSanFrancisco, many of whom I’m still in touch with and a few of whom are very close friends — even best friends. My stint in tech, which lasted over fourteen years, also yielded some wonderful friends among the writers and editors I worked with. My clean-energy career of the last decade has offered up fewer friends, but not zero; I’ve been to a couple of their weddings, talked to one about her divorce and another about her plan to have a child. Some friends even remain from my job at law book publisher Bancroft-Whitney way back in the late 1980s.

Not everyone has this at work.

If we don’t, how else do we meet friends when our school years are over? I made a surprising number of friends in a building where I lived for a decade in the Mission. Rafael and I have become friends with a couple of our realtors, as people do. I met new friends in the midst of covid social-distancing thanks to an online book group. I’ve met many of my friends, including some of my best friends, through other friends. One day in the late 1980s, a friend walking down the streets of San Francisco ran into a friend he’d known in New Mexico; he and his girlfriend became some of my best friends for a while. Twice since living in the Bay Area, I’ve become friends with people I met and then met again, several years apart, through different friends. The web of connections is strong here.

In those webs of connection, wherever we live, there are so many rings of friends and associates. We may be able to say which friends are our best friends, but what about all the other rings? The close friends who aren’t quite best friends — but where is that line? The friends you’re always glad to see but aren’t as close to. The long-term family friends. The co-workers you saw daily for years but rarely see anymore. The acquaintances of all stripes. The bartender or doorman at the local dive where you go dancing, the fellow dancers you see the next day on the subway. The barista, the family who runs the corner store, the favorite waiter. The neighbors, some of whom you’d like to know better than you do — but when you walk around the neighborhood, it’s good to greet people by name.

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Tomorrow, I’m boarding a plane to go to Europe for the first time in fifteen years. In Barcelona and Paris, I’ll be visiting friends. It’s great to see new places, experience different cultures, and meet locals when you travel. It’s all the sweeter when those locals are also friends.

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Do you have one best friend? Many circles of friends? Are you satisfied with the quality of your friendships? Let me know in the comments!