Just remember what your old pal said
When I dragged myself out to my computer this morning there was a nice, lovely long email from my very good friend Charlie. He and I were friends in high school and have been friends now for ... 7 or 8 years. Ask me to pinpoint when I met him and I couldn't tell you. I just know that we became friends playing Scholars' bowl in high school and then became better friends when I went off to college. Eventually we dated but by "dated" I mean we were "officially together" but he was in California working at an internship of sorts in Silicon Valley and I was in Wichita doing the usual summer job thing. The email I got from him this morning prompted me to think about the evolution of a friendship. When we were in high school there were no phone calls or hanging out at each other's houses - our lives just didn't work that way. And when I went off to college it was JUST phone calls ... but those weren't that frequent or that exciting anyway. Finally when he went off to college we started calling each other a lot. And by "a lot" what I mean is for 2 or 3 hours every night, like clockwork, starting around 11:30, we'd talk. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure what we talked about but I know we talked. Sometimes he'd set the phone on top of a piano and play preludes by Chopin or Rachmaninoff for me. I'd listen and figure I was going to marry a musician because music makes me happy. When I had to read Shakespeare's plays for an English class, sometimes he'd pull up the same play online and read parts with me. And on a Saturday night if I didn't have a swim meet and he didn't have a fraternity outing, we'd decide on a movie (this was back in the day when movies were very available online) and watch it together, with me in St. Louis, and him in Boston at MIT. We did this for a couple of years and it was great fun. Eventually I flew to Boston to attend a fraternity formal with him and stay with him for a few days. That, too, was great fun. As Charlie got more and more involved in his fraternity and I got more and more involved in research and swimming, the 2-3 hours became 1-2 hours. And then it became 1-2 hours 2 or 3 times a week. By the time my senior year rolled around we were trying to call each other every week but usually it didn't work out. We were just too busy. When I graduated from college and moved to North Carolina to attend the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, we sort of just drifted away from each other. We'd try and call each other about once a month, or we'd see each other online, but not much "keeping-up" was done. When I started dating JJ, that became even less. Given the option of spending time with my future husband or on the phone with an old friend, I almost always chose my future husband. We resorted to email. Now that I'm married and settled into married life (which is great, by the way) Charlie and I have actually done BETTER about our friendship than we have in the last couple of years, but we've done a lot of learning. Now it's twice monthly phone calls, and maybe monthly emails. But they're always full of good information and it's always tinged with the childish banter that has characterized our whole relationship. It's funny how our friendship has changed over the years. It's not like it's more or less important, at least I don't see it that way. It's just very adaptable. Charlie's more adaptable than me so when we first stopped calling each other so often I didn't like it much. But I spent a lot of time reminding myself that I was happy he had found such a great group of friends at his fraternity, that he was happy in his college career at MIT, and that he was progressing towards his future, whatever that was. And every time I did talk to him, it was a treat, just like now when I get loooong emails from him, they are fun to read. He was thrilled for me when I got married (he came to the wedding!) and I was thrilled for him when he got his first job out of college (he works for a little company in Seattle called "Amazon" ... ever heard of it?) and now as we get ready to both take on the next big thing in life, we are again thrilled and supportive of each other. What has made our friendship work, at least to me, is something that we've always left unspoken, and something that we've both always understood but never had to articulate. It's the fact that while we both know that we'll probably always be friends, and we'll always have that history of best-friendship, the kind where you tell each other everything, life happens, and our job isn't to try and keep our friendship exactly the same. Our job is to let our friendship change with life so that our lives can keep on going.