A Time to See the Emptiness of Life Without Our Friends

I have been calling into my past. My past has been calling me. It’s a spontaneous roll call of friendships. Some of these people I haven’t heard from in 30 years. Others I saw just recently. I think we’re reaching out as a way to hold on.

When we’re in need, we remember to think about why we have friends.

My friends and I are catching up. But I see now that it’s been too long since we moved ahead. Dinner here, dinner there, an afternoon outing, a concert, holiday parties, terse e-mails, the phone. Mere hours spread over years.

Before we say goodbye, my friends and I grope through our calendars, looking for that next alignment of the planets when our paths might intersect. Usually, the best we can do is tentative, depending on what spouses may be planning, on what may come up in the meantime, on this and on that. We’ll catch up again later.

Once I knew practically everything about my friends. Now their lives are full of mystery. We rarely talk about our longings or our fears. We never drop in on each other without notice or knocking.

We are wrapped up in our successes and failures. We need time for ourselves, time for our chores around the house, our nests. And our families, yes, always come first. In America, we are never far from the phrase, “family values.” We seldom speak of “friendship values.” We have family holidays, national holidays, religious holidays, holidays for the dead but none for our friends.

It has been four years since a friend and I went somewhere to do something for more than just a day. That was when Frank and I paddled 225 miles of the Yukon River in a canoe. We were kids again for 10 days. We dropped our guard in the way that only children, or friends, can. We have not planned another retreat.

Perhaps celebrities fill the void in our culture. Many people I know spend more time with characters on television and radio than they do with their friends. Tom Brokaw and Bob Edwards are reliable presences in the lives of my friends. I’m not.

When I have traveled overseas, I notice that people in developing counties spend more time with friends. Maybe because they are poor, they can afford to.

We have reached midlife, my friends and I. By now, we are pretty much stuck with each other. If you were to ask, I’d say I know the value of friends. I’ll be there when they need me. But what if they need me now? How would I know?

The puzzle pieces of our lives hardly ever fit anymore. We are all specialists these days. Two of my friends are epicures. Another raises rabbits and potbellied pigs. One of my friends travels only to Europe. Another won’t leave Alaska. A couple of my friends are baseball fanatics, one is a birder, another a bow hunter and one just took up golf. Most of my friends are married, and their spouses have their own specialized interests.

America’s perpetual diaspora means that few of us live where we did. It’s easy to travel, but travel is hard. Spontaneity is gone and things have to be arranged. “Life,” sang John Lennon, “is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

I won’t buy an electronic organizer with its neat efficiency. My old Filofax serves as a diary of my friendships. Each scratched-out address is a piece of our shared history. I cannot, or will not, count just how many friends I have. Maybe I’m afraid of how many I carry around in name only. Maybe I can’t bear discovering how little of myself I give to something that I know I would be empty without.

I have tried talking about friendship to my friends, and I see a twinge of what looks like sadness in their eyes too. “I think about it all the time,” said a friend. She didn’t have a second sentence.

In bad times we ponder good things that we have deferred in life. In bad times we think to remember that later can be too late.