Choosing Friends
“Tell me what company thou keepst, and I’ll tell thee what thou art.”
- Miguel de Cervantes
“Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.”
-Benjamin Franklin“If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.”
- Samuel Johnson
The whole concept of choosing my friends carefully was alien to me as a kid. Friendships developed out of convenience and proximity, nothing more. If Facebook was around back then, I would have gorged on it and fused myself to its Borg-like collective. To be my friend, you only had to talk to me or sit next to me. Had my parents known about this lackluster vetting process, they would have reconsidered the amount of unsupervised time I spent with them.
“So, who are your friends, Matthew?”
Hastily, in order to speed up the interrogation process, I rattled off whatever names came to mind not thinking I would soon be spending more one-on-one time with them as a result. To wit, I remember several rather uncomfortable drop-offs that can be easily traced back to these interrogations. My world was expanding, and would continue to expand so long as my tongue waggled so heedlessly.
“How would you like to visit your friend Jimmy after school?”
“Jimmy?” Did she mean that kid that sat next to me who told gross jokes?
“Yes, your friend Jimmy.”
What could I say? I wasn’t capable of saying no to such things. I lacked a backbone and a strong will, things my younger brother seemed to have in excess and that constantly got him in more trouble than I did. I think I had associated backbone and will with ‘talking back’ and ‘giving lip’ when exercised inappropriately, so I just went along instead. That was my strategy for not getting into trouble; do not offend.
“What kind of cake would you like for your birthday party, Matthew?”
“I don’t care.”
“Which of these t-shirt do you like best?”
“I don’t care.”
My inability to assert my will or even share an opinion troubled my parents so much that they procured Maurice Sendak’s, “Pierre: A Cautionary Tale” as my bedtime story. You see, Pierre was the obstinate little boy who just didn’t care:
“What would you like to eat?”
“I don’t care!”
“Some lovely cream of wheat?”
“I don’t care!”
Don’t sit backwards on your chair.”
“I don’t care!”
“Or pour syrup on your hair.”
“I don’t care!”
Using books in this way was not an uncommon practice in my upbringing. In addition to having no backbone and a will, I was also a known dawdler who soon found his parents reading, with some emphasis, the tale of the “Poky Little Puppy.” That story never really worked on me as Pierre did, perhaps because a Lion didn’t eat the Puppy in the end, as was the misfortune of naughty little Pierre (for a moment anyway). I’m still pokey, after all, but I’m happy to report that the “I don’t care” phase didn’t last long. My mother tested the limits of my apathy one day when purchasing some new dress shoes. I honestly believe she picked out the most hideous pair of shoes she could find. They were green-black in color with a bumpy surface, like toad skin with one-inch thick black soles. I’d never seen anything like them. Who would buy these things? But it didn’t matter, my mother suggested they would look good with some outfit of mine and I, thinking she would read my mind’s “no way,” said, “I don’t care,” instead; my fate sealed.
It hit me, as we were driving home, that I really did care. Those shoes were horrible and I agreed to their purchase. Now, I had to wear them and explain to friends–friends with cool sneakers–why I was wearing discounted imports from Slovakia. But outside this single exception, a lesson learned the old-fashioned way, I wasn’t very good at connecting the dots or drawing inferences between the moral of the story and my life. Likewise, I didn’t see how my careless dropping of names would lead to a sudden string of “friendship co-ops” and outings.
Having spent the majority of our playtime outside, with little supervision, my brother and I cultivated an imaginative world of play; a little too vigorous for friends deemed “lucky” enough to spend the afternoon with us. I remember one friend who got sick just from walking up our dirt road. This was much longer than his usual walk of 30 yards from the bus stop to his front door (lucky bum). He got nauseous and weak in the knees after drinking what he thought was warm milk. It wasn’t, but we took him home anyway. I think it was the climb that got to him. What a waste of an afternoon. I hated when play dates ended like that.
Through trial and error, my brother and I learned how persuade our peers to do things they wouldn’t normally do because it promised to be “fun” and “wicked cool.” For us, it was always fun! This was no lie we were peddling. Many newcomers (recently co-opted friends, for example) haplessly fell into our well-laid strategems. A game appropriately titled, “Houdini” comes to mind…
© 2010, R M Braaten. All rights reserved.