(At the top of this page I was going to post a picture of myself at the age of seventeen from my high school yearbook but the yearbooks are in a big box under lots of big boxes in the back of a big closet where spiders also live. So, maybe next time.)
As a rule, I don't think anyone enjoys their seventeenth year, but I don't remember enjoying my seventeenth year terribly much. I turned seventeen on January 20, 1985, when I was in eleventh grade - a pretty bleak time for me in a pretty bleak high school experience - & was that age until the middle of my twelfth grade year.
& there were surely lots of dumb adventures I could recount, which I will save (memory willing) for when I recount my life for my 1985 birthday show, which is just in four (!) years. But there is one thing I want to talk about which I think about now, more than thirty years after I was seventeen. Which is friendship.
Recently I stumbled onto a Facebook page for the thirtieth reunion of my high school class. I never cared to go to any of the other reunions, but what was most interesting was the fact that Facebook had a list of folks invited or interested - & I knew virtually none of them. What a strange realization - that I knew almost nobody in my class at high school! I mean, at least three or four of the people I liked a lot weren't on the list - I wasn't on the list! - but still, shouldn't I at least recognize three-fourths or two-thirds of the names? Nope. I did not. They were strangers, as they probably were in high school.
From eleventh grade, I have managed to keep two friends in my life, both of whom I talk to regularly even now. One of them I went to high school with, the other I met outside of my high school in a comic book club.
What is common among both is that I pursued the friendship. If you were to go back in time & count the number of times I called them versus the number of times they called me (if you were keeping count), you'd find I called them to talk to them many more times than they ever thought to communicate with me. One of them even told me, probably in my seventeenth year, that I wore them down, I keep calling, after school, & eventually he relented, acquiescing to be my friend.
By the way, both of these people were male. I had virtually no contact with girls at this age. What would I talk about? Why would they talk to me?
The truth is, one of these two has stayed my friend only on the flimsiest of connections. It pains me in my sad middle age to note this, but he was only my friend as long as I liked the same things he did, agreed with his attitudes about the world, refused to challenge any of his ridiculous ideas. Once I did, he distanced himself from me. & what's worse, he rationalized a tremendous betrayal of our friendship by his utter disdain for me at some point in the future. Not to be a tease, but really, that's another story.
Why do I even talk to this person? I think it's because I sometimes think I should be a better person than I am. He & I have very little in common these days, & in fact, he's kind of afraid of me - when we talk, if I disagree with him - something I didn't really do in those early days - he often seems a little fearful, a little timid, as if he's still clinging to a time when he had a sycophant & not a friend. The number of substantial conversations we've had in the last ten years is so small I am forced to wonder if we ever had any real conversations, if, in fact, when we were young, I just wanted so badly to have a friend that I endured his self-important baloney despite my misgivings. Because I did love him, & love forgives. He didn't love me so much as disdain me. But! Like me, he had very few friends. & until he did find friends independently (he often became friends with my friends), he kept me around.
Why in the would do I still talk to him? That is a good question. Luckily, we don't talk too much. & probably, as time goes on, we will talk very little.
By the way, the other friend with whom I was close in my seventeenth years continues to be a friend & appears as often as possible on Self Help Radio as my spiritual mentor the Rev. Dr. Howard Gently. We've had our rough patches but we're doing all right. & I am so fucking grateful that we're still friends & he gives so much to my dumb radio show!
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