What's Built on Small Kindnesses Swapped Back and Forth and Over Again?

Friendship. We all need it in our lives, no matter our age.

I’ve read that when we’re younger, our friendships are influenced by so-called life tasks (finishing school, getting a job, raising a family). As we age, we tend to develop more cross-generational friendships. Then come our golden years, which are less about building new friendships than sustaining old ones.

That all strikes me as true, although, if I’m honest, it’s hard to remember back when.

To jog my memory, I once asked my grandson Britton to remind me how young people make friends. Seven years old at the time, here’s what he said:

“Start to know them …and start playing with them. Start talking about yourself. Tell them what you like, and you tell them what you don’t like. They might have something in common. Then they might say, ’Let’s be friends.’”

If only it were always that easy, no?

But that was in 2019, when Britton hung out with a neighbor of ours who happens to be his age. Back then, Britton and Illyana would play for hours, laughing at the same tasteless fart jokes, making You Tube videos of God-awful science experiments, sometimes just trying to escape their younger siblings, who were ‘annoying’.

Jump forward to 2023. Britton and Illyana walk home from the middle-school bus stop on opposite sides of the street. God help them, accidental eye contact might deem them ‘a couple’.

Could anything be more heinous than that?

Granted, Britton still goes over to Illyana’s house, but only to see if her younger brother Camden would like to shoot hoops.

Ah, the complexities of friendship. Always evolving. Often in beautiful strands of rainbow-colored silk. But sometimes in coarse, fickle bunches of scratchy burlap.

Through the years, I’ve experienced more silk than burlap. Lucky me, my friendships have crossed not just generational boundaries but gender and ethnic lines as well.

Some of my most precious friendships continue to be with other women, some met through neighborhood gatherings, church, and work. Others through book clubs or friends of friends—or even my kids.

Who would have guessed my kids’ friends might have moms I like hanging out with? And who would have predicted we’d form a foursome we called our Happy Hour? You know, like the Spice Girls, minus one member. Or maybe the Sex and the City Girls, minus the city. No, make that Thelma and Louise, squared. (Just without that one last crazy ride in the convertible.)

Seems just like that, our Happy Hour has morphed into something more reminiscent of the Golden Girls. I don’t know how or when that happened. I just know that I miss my girlfriends!

These past eight months, I feel like I’ve stood a better chance of finishing a marathon in record time than getting together with my own sweet Golden Girls. I can’t remember the last time all four of us got together. Maybe in 2021? Shoot, even though three out of four of us still live within two miles of one another, out of sixteen attempts to meet up in 2023, only two have worked out. TWO. (Superbowl Sunday with our guys. And an August dinner—again with the guys—for who knows what reason. Maybe because we all had the same open date on our calendar.)

May I make a confession? More than once, I’ve fretted my now Golden Girl friends no longer need me. Or worse, they no longer want to hang out as much. And you know what? Both those things are both probably true. Because long-time friendships don’t just happen. They happen when people grow older. And growing older brings new complexities to the mix, like illnesses—our own, our spouses’, our extended families’. Stomach bugs and vertigo. COVID-exposure and surgeries and physical therapy. And let's not forget crises with extended family and aging parents. Last-minute requests involving the grandkids. Even good things, like time to finally travel, have meant a cutback on our once-upon-a-time frequent gatherings.

But while I miss my friends, I’d hate if you pitied us.

Long-term friends make room for the ebbs and the flows, for those pockets when gatherings become sparse, for whatever reason. True friends make efforts to sustain what they’ve built.

And let me tell you, that takes work. Sometimes it almost seems easier to develop new friendships.

Almost.

As I write this, I’m preparing to attend a writers’ conference in Chicago. I look forward to seeing some new writing friends I met at last year’s conference—and making some even newer friends this year as well. I’m excited. But I’m nervous, too. What if I pack the wrong things to wear and look like a misfit? What if I can’t think of what to say, or worse, blurt out something inappropriate?

I don’t know if anything could be more heinous than that.

But I take comfort in knowing this: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Friendship remains important, no matter our age or stage in life, regardless of our gender or ethnicity. Whether rekindling old friendships or celebrating new ones, what’s not to love about small kindnesses swapped back and forth and over again?

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