[ed. I like the term "carbonation" in reference to a certain type of friend. I share that inclination.]
“He has lots of friends,” we’ll mention in recommending somebody, whether a plumber or a stockbroker: he’s okay, he’ll lend an ear, he won’t leave a customer in the lurch. Lending an ear is essential in mainline friendships, and less disruptive than lending money. “I’m always here for you” is the desired pledge (like the colloquial promise “I have your back”) of best-friendship, a category often lasting at least until marriage, if not beyond. The personalities that occupy the niche—nerd or happy-go-lucky—might change according to the phases of life, but draw a nostalgic smile in our mind’s eye when we remember them. (...)
“How are you?” is the current universal greeting in America, yet not to answer “Fine” would violate the social compact in a minor way because almost nobody who asks wants to know if you’re not. If you can’t keep your marbles together, agencies exist to do it for you. Friends are for when the question isn’t rote, however, and the “Me, myself, and I” of childhood fame feels buffaloed. You and the cat are watching a hummingbird feeder out the window; yet you need more to get up and fight the day. Call a fellow vinyl collector, card player, Little League coach. Yes, the specialist told us on the spectrum of autism it’s a milder kind. … So he sez it was only a one-night stand; he didn’t expect me to cry. … My skills are dated or outdated, whichever term they used. … I was so happy for a second, I couldn’t speak, didn’t try, but then he died. … I wonder if 40 is too late to apply for the ministry? Is it silly to inquire? … The school apologized for letting him go home on the bus. They didn’t realize it was a concussion. … A friend pauses to listen, his grin of solace not a tic. (...)
In adulthood, friendships originate adventitiously: at the water cooler or neighborhood association. My closest in old age began when a pizza counterman made fun of my stutter and I returned out of curiosity to see why he would. It turned out that he needed affection so badly, he felt compelled to outrage strangers to test their loyalty; after testing mine, he became wonderfully generous, recounting dozens of typewriter-ready stories I could make use of, from war lore to which of the ladies in the Laundromat had turned tricks (he said) in her youth.
He protected my house from robbery or vandalism during hunting season, while mending relations with his children, estranged to various degrees, rehearsing with me his explanations to them beforehand. His fireman father had thrown his mother down the cellar stairs, so although he was Irish, a local Jersey mafia don adopted him as a mascot for landscaping or driving hijacked trucks from Point A to Point B. His mother, when he was small, used to take him to a Catholic cemetery to pee on the graves of the nuns who’d mistreated her at their orphanage, slamming her fingers in a door, and so forth—another memory his combat stint in Korea didn’t soften. In reparative interludes we made friends—the verb is kinetic—till the pistol he carried no longer tempted him toward Russian roulette. But he still drove customers away if he could, skinning the raccoons and coyotes he trapped on the sandwich board at his greasy spoon, so that if people wandered in asking for a pastrami hero, John could point at the naked carcass he was cutting at: “Pick your part!” It decreased sales. (...)
I like carbonation in my friends: out-on-a-limb idealism or a traveler’s itch, a shivery past or libertarian streak, with frostbite scars, perhaps, or a veteran’s fatalistic flinch when a car backfires. The “vibes” people speak of seem natural to me. When you intuit that somebody you hadn’t expected is approaching before they reach your door, or realize that a person, silent, elsewhere in the house, needs a hug, it’s not “extrasensory perception” but telepathy to antennae we haven’t pinpointed, a force field we haven’t quantified, which also warns us, when we’re hurrying down a city street, about unseen dangers around the corner: potential collisions, muggers, flimflammers, whatever.
by Edward Hoagland, The American Scholar | Read more:
Photo by Maureen Lunn
