Old Friends

If you ask ChatGPT to list the pluses of getting old, under the category “Social and Lifestyle Advantages,” it will say that “friendships and family bonds tend to become more meaningful and less transactional.” So true. But it doesn’t go into some of the deeper elements underpinning that truth. For example, it doesn’t expound on the comfort and delight of old, old friendships.

All friendships are wonderful, but unlike newer friends, old friends, especially friends from our youth, are not just people we met and happened to like; they are woven through the fabric of our entire lives and make it stronger.

I once asked an old friend why, since we lived so far apart and in entirely different worlds, she had kept in such close touch with me through the years. She told me that I was her “roots.” I was the only person from her youth still living near where she grew up, and I had known her home, her parents, her siblings, her pets, her friends, and, later, her husband. Because of that, I was an anchor for her. I realized then that she and my other old friends were my anchors, too. Some of them are still in the mainstream of my life, while others are farther out on the periphery, but we all continue to keep track of how we are doing. The mainstay of our friendship is love, but it’s bolstered by our shared memories.

We define ourselves not only from what we know of the “self” we harbor within, but also from what others carry around in their heads about us. The longer we have known them, the more they carry around. Old friends can place us in a way that even our spouses, children, or anyone else who came along later cannot. They were on the scene as we grew to maturity and carved out an adult life. They knew the other principal players that shaped our lives. They knew our hopes and dreams, triumphs and traumas—and they know how everything turned out and the reasons for it. So, in that way, old friends are keepers of parts of our selves. But they are also keepers of our young selves—selves that grow dimmer with each year. They keep “then” alive. As such, they are the co-owners of our memories and keepers of our youth, and, just as we carry a bit of them within ourselves, they, too, carry a bit of ourselves within them.  

I hope we all still have an old friend or three in our lives. If you have a special old friendship you’d like to share something about in the comment section below, we’d love to read about it.

Have a great October.

Julie

PS This post is late because I’ve had two concussions within a few weeks of one another, and recovery has required that I stay away from “screens” as much as possible.