Friendship - September 21, 2007

What felt frogs and dead presidents teach us about ourselves.

 

            It’s really interesting that such a cliché word can mean so many things to so many people. A friend of mine recently referenced “the friendship connection” and all it did was give me an image of Kermit the Frog singing his heart out about rainbows in The Muppet Movie (or was it The Great Muppet Caper). We have all these different images associated with the word, (friendship, not rainbows) I sometime feel like it is all one big inkblot test and all the men in the white coats just keep asking me what comes to me first.

            I have this picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a cool hat driving a car with a cigarette cocked proudly in his mouth, on the wallpaper of my computer. The man was incredible! He served as president for 12 years, and brought the country through two catastrophes, The Great Depression and World War II. His most important role became educator and a sort of friend through his fireside chats. The guy came into office handicapped from a severe battle with Polio and the presidency itself practically killed him.

            I wish I had it in me to give so much of myself to a group of friends that I might surrender my life to their cause. As someone who wants to become an educator, I would like to think that I would devote that much of myself to my students. What better complement can you receive than to be told that you were kind enough to give your life to someone or something?

I am not going in a Kent State direction here. I like to think that I am politically minded and aware of my surroundings, but I will be the first to tell you that I will not be engaging in a stand off with the national guard any time soon.  What I am saying is that there are very few things in my life worth giving that sort of commitment to, I only wish someone else would be willing to do it for me.

Who do I think I am you ask. I am a coward, I will tell you outright. I don’t do well with guns pointed in my direction, angry mobs, or even snakes, but come on, who doesn’t want someone else to be that much in love with them. Face the facts, I am not willing to throw my life away on just anything, but I would be thrilled for someone else to do so for me.

I am part of this group of guys that have been friends for maybe seven years, which is a pretty long time when you are all on the short side of twenty. The five of us are all pretty close, hell, throw out the pretty, we are very close. We have all stood together through girlfriends, breakups, heart surgeries, and even put up with one of us becoming close to multiple ex-girlfriends of the group. We have taken to trying to compare ourselves to something more grandiose and official sounding than just calling ourselves “the guys”. We once compared ourselves to a “band of brothers” but decided to leave HBO serials behind, and we remain just “the guys” to this day.

We would all go to bat for the next guy, stand up for him in the face of large much more powerful (and menacing) people than ourselves for the sake of doing what’s right, and at the expense of a severe beating. I hesitate to say though, outside of casual boasting, that one of us would actually take a bullet for the next guy. Not personally looking for a bullet wound anytime in the near future, I am not sure how I would react in the heat of the moment, but it would certainly be a tricky situation to make a decision during.

Mortal combat aside, I am certainly grateful for the friends that I do have. Though we bug the heck out of each other, we always seem to be in the same place at the same time for the pleasure of crafting fresh insults to hurl in good fun.

It’s amazing, regardless of who is dating who’s ex-girlfriend or who has been stewing on bitter sentiments lately, we are all able to put our minor differences aside for the sake of simply having support for each other. When it comes down to severe depression, family loss, heart disease, or frayed relationships, we have always sewn up our stinging wounds left over from the last bout of video games and arrange a meeting to talk things over, sometimes on less than ten minutes of warning. We can look at each other in the circle and know that we truly are a band of brothers bound not by disposition or economic status but by our simple trust in the goodness and love in the heart of the guy sitting next to us.

            So maybe I am not strong enough to volunteer for bullet wounds, or to place my head on the chopping block by myself, but I know that when good friends band together, they can overcome nearly anything thrown at them.

  J.F.