Friends, who needs ’em?

Friend. This unassuming word can mean so much. What is a friend? According to my Mother its something you can never have too many of. We say that when things get bad you find out who your real friends are, and that you never know how many friends you’ve got until you die. What is that special connection between two people that transcends background, creed and social status as the connection we seek beyond all others? What is it that makes some people mere acquaintances and some people worth getting up at 4:00 in the morning to have breakfast with after a year of  non contact?

 

Something deeper than simple shared experience lies beneath the façade of this type of friendship, what is it? These are not just people who think we are cool. They are the ones who have concrete evidence to the contrary and yet somehow seek out our company anyway. There may be ethnic, cultural, or class differences. We may meet under interesting circumstances, but there below the surface is the feeling when your hands touch in greeting for the first time that there is something significant about this person in your life, some deeper meaning.

 

What would the joys and sorrows of life be without a friend to share them with? Without people to laugh or cry with us, would we really exist? There’s a line from a song in a musical, the song is Hey look Me Over and as sad as it is I don’t know what show it’s from (And here I am the professional director with over twenty-five musicals under my belt) it goes: Nobody in the world was ever without a friend. How are you in the world if nobody knows your there?

 

They say that the average person only has two or three close friends at any given time. (unless you watch “Friends” and then they say you believe you have more friends versus non-watchers, although this is an old statistic and may not be holding up in syndication) I have a very good friend, Jerry, he and I used to do breakfast every Thursday and just sit and talk for hours. We would talk about anything, the nature of the universe down to how are the wife and kids. Now, it seems, that relationship gets recharged every six or eight months when we usually call each other, without knowing the other has called, within a day or two, weird, huh? See, I think the connections we feel to others have so much more to them than what we can see, or hear, or say. I believe that this flesh mask that hides reality is not nearly so concrete as it appears. I believe that our spirits do relate to the spirits of those we meet on a deeper level.

 

Now I am not talking about ESP, or ET or any those other E’s that may apply to this subject, no I mean that God has intricately layered our universe in such a way that if we pay attention there is so much we feel and know that we push back to the edges of our consciousness. These relationships tend to bend those barriers, we feel their pain sometimes as deeply as our own. We communicate unspokenly when the waitress says something to the customer in the next booth that means something to us.

 

The encouragement and comfort you get from a good friend is not surface stuff, it goes deep, it has the power to allow healing to take place in old wounds. It is the casual word that makes you believe you can, or know you shouldn’t. This is the stuff that makes all of the other  knappy headed ho’ crap of life worth bearing.  ( No, not a Don Imus fan, but I am a big fan of the bill of rights, although I am really torn as to whether this is the system working, after all even AL Sharpton has the right to free speech, or if this is a bad joke gone terribly awry)

 

Anyway Jerry and I had breakfast the other day and it was great. Somehow just knowing there is somebody out there that will take time out of their schedule on short notice to hang with me somehow makes everything a little brighter. No, I can’t tell you what we talked about, well I could but then the black helicopters would swoop down and snatch you away for reprogramming. (they can read our thoughts you know)