As anyone reading this knows by now, I moved back to Indiana to spend time with my parents. My mother and father are both still alive but in their seventies and eighties and, so, not going to be around forever. As I was making the decision to move here I thought most about it being nice to be with family, but I didn't give much consideration to the fact that I had absolutely no friends here. All the friends I had growing up here are dead.
Its not like I had more friends than I knew what to do with in Seattle because I didn't. I'm not that kind of person. I don't have lots of friends. If anything I have many acquaintances and a (very) few good friends. I don't call someone "friend" lightly, like many people do, the majority of the people I spent time with were acquaintances. Acquaintances, to me, are the people you know from work, or the club you're a member of. You might spend eight hours a day or more working with them, getting to know a bit about their lives and who they are as people. You might go out for beers after work, you might even have them and their families over to your home for dinner, but, unless you can show up at their door unexpected and at some inconvenient hour and expect to be helped without fear of consequence to themselves, they are not your friends. A "friend," to me, is someone who can show up at my door at two o' clock in the morning with blood on them and the sounds of sirens in the distance, but getting louder as they approach. "Let's get you inside," I would say to my friend. After making sure they were not in need of medical attention, I would ask them what had happened, "What brings you to my door at this hour, covered in blood?" Depending on what they told me, I would do my best to help them, whether that meant hiding them, or helping them to decide how to turn themselves in to the authorities, which ever, or both. A person I called "friend" is someone who would do the same for me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not disparaging acquaintances. I've spent many happy hours hanging out with acquaintances from the various places I've worked over the years and then from the Elks lodge in Burien. Besides, in most cases, friends start out as acquaintances, and then something about the relationship changes, usually in some subtle way that you can't quite put your finger on, but you both know it has happened just the same.
So, this post has turned into some sort of essay about what constitutes a friend and that's not what I originally intended. What I started out wanting to convey is that in Seattle I had people in my life that I enjoyed spending time with, Harold and Laura, and Kevin, just to name a few. Here, I have no one. There's my family, of course, the folks I moved here to spend time with, my parents and my brother, and they're all great, but they're not the same as friends. Family are people the universe has seen fit to assign to you, friends are the people you choose to be part of your life.
As I said, the three people who were my friends growing up here in Indiana are all dead now. Danny and Michael died of cancer, and Mark committed suicide. If I were a whole man, not broken and old, I would be doing the things one does to meet people, go to bars or join a club, something, but the instances of feeling well enough to do those things are few and far between, and, when I am feeling well enough to go out and do something, I feel like I should spend that time with my family. After all, that's why I moved here in the first place.
Perhaps I should say something here to keep this from just being a post about feeling sorry for myself. So I'll say this, whoever you're spending time with, parent, spouse or lover, family or friend or acquaintance, whether they've been assigned to you or you've chosen them, take time to really appreciate the fact that they're in your life at all because the circumstances of your life will change, whether in the blink of an eye or as a thought out decision you make, and those people won't be available to you anymore.
Comments