Managing Editor
Since the onset of the pandemic, I’ve observed a meme circulating on Facebook and other social media that challenges participants to list the number of years of their longest friendships and speculates nobody has friendships lasting longer than 20 years. As someone who’s been around a long time, I think the question is silly, as I have friends that I made in first grade back in 1959 and many others I met throughout school more than 50-some years ago.
I also have friends I made while
serving in the Air Force in the 1970s and 1980s and others from college and
early in my career working for newspapers. Although I may not speak directly
with many of my friends that I’ve accumulated every day, I do follow some of
their social media posts and try to catch up through activities such as
attending my high school reunions or by telephone.Ed Pierce, right, and his friend Mickey Justice during Reforger
military exercises in Germany in 1978. COURTESY PHOTO
Driving home from work a few years
ago, I listened to an NPR podcast on the radio in which a relationship
consultant suggested if you want a friendship to last a long time, it’s
inevitable that changes with your friendship will occur over time and people have
to be flexible to remain friends.
She said that the longer a
friendship lasts, the more it becomes susceptible to becoming uncomfortable.
According to her, people inevitably change, and that evolving friendship dynamic
can strain relationships such as when your best friend in high school marries someone
you don’t like, and you don’t see them much anymore, or you get a new job, and
you now work a new schedule and hardly ever see your former co-worker pals now.
But do situations like that spell
the end of friendships? I tend to disagree. I have played in a fantasy baseball
league with many of the same friends for the past 19 years and we have all gone
in many different directions since the league was originally founded in 2004.
One big change was I moved from
Florida to New Hampshire and then to Maine a few years back. But my friend
Jack, a mortgage broker from Florida who also plays in the league, and I have
remained friends even though I haven’t seen him in person since 2013. I just
had a long text exchange last week with him wanting to congratulate my
schoolteacher wife on her retirement and I asked him about potential tax
incentives for her tutoring a few students in our home and how the real estate
market is fairing in Florida these days.
I also post my newspaper columns on
Facebook and Twitter every week and many of my high school friends are among
the first to read them and make comments about how they can relate to the
column’s topic or what they thought about the content of the columns. Some of
these individuals are friends that I made while attending Carlton Webster
Junior High School way back in 1966.
In the past few weeks, I’ve heard
from someone that I supervised in the Air Force in 1983, a co-worker of mine
from a newspaper in New Hampshire in 2014, and a college fraternity pal from
1972 in New Mexico. I learned something new about each of these friends through
our latest conversations and we picked up almost from about the last time we
spoke, in one case nearly 15 years ago.
I’ve lost touch with friends that I
wish I could speak to again but because of distance or circumstance it’s not
possible. My Air Force buddy in Germany, James Smith, is a great example for
instance. We were close friends from 1977 to 1979 but the last time I saw him
was when he was flying home a few months before I left Germany myself in 1979.
I never saw him again and have no idea what he’s been up to for the past 43
years, but it does not mean we couldn’t be friends again if I ever track him
down.
Having reached the advanced age I
now am, I can also say I’ve lost many wonderful people over time that I’ve been
close with and not because they no longer wanted to be my friend.
I’ve learned that the longer a
friendship goes on, you must accept that life is fragile, and nobody lives
forever. In the last 20 years, I’ve said goodbye to many high school
classmates, former co-workers, and people I’ve met through the years that I’ve
liked and admired.
It’s a fact that long lasting friendships
will change and the changes that do happen won't always be comfortable.
I’ve also found out that in my
lifetime I have gone through many different versions of myself. I’ve evolved
from a Little League baseball player to a U.S. Air Force staff sergeant, to an
inexperienced reporter and sportswriter to a husband and stepfather to a
newspaper editor and now a grandfather.
It means that the friends I make in each experience are part of individual chapters of my life and it’s up to me to blend them all into a friendship tapestry that is woven from all the various experiences of my life. <
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