I had told myself, going into this stretch of the year, that I would write about the friendships that stayed. I was thinking, when I made that promise, of the long ones — the friends I have had for decades, the ones whose voicemails I do not need to play twice. I assumed they would be the only ones in the entry.
They are not. The deeper surprise of this season has been the new ones.
I had been renting a small place from a man named Brad through the worst stretch of the treatment-and-recovery months. Brad was, by every reasonable definition, a landlord. By every other definition that has ever mattered to me, he became something else. Brad is contagious. He is spontaneous in the way people are when life has already taken several swings at them and they have decided the only sane response is to keep showing up loud. He is also wounded, and he does not pretend otherwise, which is a quality I have come to value above almost anything else in another human. We bonded the way two men with insomnia and Michelob Ultras eventually do — at the porch table, at four in the morning, with no plan and no audience. The talks went where they went. Some of them I will carry for a long time.
Brad has, like most generous people I have known, been used by some of the people who claimed to care about him. I will not get into specifics, because they are his, not mine. I will say only that I tried to be a different kind of guest in his life than that, and that he opened the door anyway, repeatedly, even when nothing in his history would have asked him to. That is the kind of friendship I do not take lightly.
I also met Nathan during that stretch. Nathan is younger, but you would not know it from a conversation. He moves through the world in his own particular way — joyful, deliberate, unguarded, and — when it matters — astonishingly honest. He has had his own difficulties, the kind that would have made a less generous spirit hard. They have not made him hard. They have made him direct in a way that is good for the rest of us to be around. I learned from him. I still am.
Echoes of Harmony
Beneath the azure dome of endless skies, Whispers of the wind weave a silent song, Nature's breath, in gentle rhythm, softly lies, In this dance of life, we all belong.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →The older friendships did stay. I want to make sure that is on the record. The ones from my life before Santa Fe, the ones from before the diagnosis, the ones from before any of the rest of this — they stayed. Some of them did the long, quiet, undramatic work of just continuing to be available, which is the form of love that gets the least credit and asks for the most stamina. I see you. I am grateful.
But this entry is also for Brad, and for Nathan. New friendships in your fifties, made under hard conditions, are a particular kind of evidence about life. They prove that the door is still opening. They prove that whoever I am becoming on the other side of this stretch is not going through it alone. I had not expected that. I will not stop being grateful for it.
If a friendship is going to last, I am increasingly convinced it shows you that early. Not in declarations. In presence. In the willingness to sit on the porch one more hour. In the calls returned without explanation. In the absence of the small calculations the disposable kind of friend always performs. The friendships that have stayed all share that quality. The ones that did not, did not, and that is its own kind of clarity.
I am keeping the porch light on a little longer this year. I have learned who tends to walk up to it.