That's Just Kind of Who I Am

When I turned 40 a little over a month ago, one of my friends from high school showed up.  Yesterday, I went to his 40th celebration, and I noticed something, in both cases, we were the only people from our teenage years at one another's 40th birthday party.  Jeff and I have been friends a long time, but we don't really see each other that much.  Twice in a little over a month is pretty much a record since graduation.  We sort of keep up on facebook and play words with friends and that is, I think, in the postmodern world, what qualifies as a friendship.  We live a little bit over two hours apart, and life is just, well... life.  We've both got wives, kids and jobs that keep us more or less occupied.  We're not high school kids who live around the block from one another any more, and since my parents moved away from the town I grew up in, I don't even have "old home" week around Christmas or Thanksgiving, my list of long-time friends is pretty small.
On the way home last night, I was thinking about how nice (and also peculiar) it was to spend time with a person you have known for such a long time, but with whom your relationship moves in very short bursts: a dinner here, a party there.  I also wondered a little why almost all of my non-church friendships seem to be of that character.
There's this scene in a documentary about The Pixies, called Loud, Quiet, Loud, where the filmmakers are chronicling the career of one of the seminal alternative bands of my high school years.  The band broke up a some point in the 1990's amid rumors that they pretty much hated each other.  The filmmaker questioned the lead singer, Black Francis or Frank Black, as he generally calls himself these days, about the reasons for the split and why, after so long, they are attempting a bit of a reunion.  Black says that he hasn't talked to any of the other Pixies for ten years, the interviewer asks if there is a reason, do they dislike each other?  Was there a conflict? Is there bad blood?
"No," Black said, "That's just kind of who we are."
When I saw that a couple of years ago, I thought, "Yes, that is kind of who we are."
I know lots of people who take a more proactive approach to friendship, and I admire that, and I suspect it's probably a good idea, but it's also not really who I am.  I'll drive two hours to a birthday party, just like he did to come to mine, but we don't usually just call each other up to catch up on stuff.  I really don't like talking on the phone, and I can't exactly tell you why, but I'm pretty sure my aversion to that form of communication is at the heart of a lot of my social oddities.
The thing is, I really like getting together with people I knew a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, it's kind of like time travel, getting in touch with the person I used to be.  A couple years back, I officiated at the wedding of one of my college room-mates, again, a sort of "check in" kind of moment.   We hadn't really seen much of one another for 15 years or so, and then we connected again, spent some time together, planned a wedding, spent a very significant moment together and then blam, I move away from Pittsburgh and it's back to liking each other's stuff on facebook.
This may sound like I'm complaining to those of you who have more conventional friendships, but I'm not, I'm really just trying to describe the way things are, without judging it, in the same sort of way Frank Black said, "That's just kind of who we are."  I admire that clarity.
Maybe it's a generational thing, maybe it's just me, but I feel entirely okay with friendships being like that.  In some ways it makes things more interesting, because I change so much in some ways from one incident to the next, but in other ways I can access stories and jokes, which I may have otherwise totally forgotten.  These friendships also provide an interesting perspective on life in general, Jeff and I are both responsible Dad-types at this particular moment, but I can tell when we talk to each other we still have this awareness that we used to drive around too fast listening to Led Zeppelin and try to think of ways to make things go boom.  We may have been, at one point, a couple of really stupid teenagers who did a bunch of really stupid stuff, and it's kind of of nice to see someone who reminds you of that, it reminds you that you are on a journey, and that you have changed quite a bit.
It also, hopefully, helps you to accept, and perhaps even forgive, the person you used to be.
Just please, don't anyone tell our kids about the stuff we used to do.