On Old Friends

I was 19 and finishing my second year of college. Life felt as though it were coming into focus. I’d been elected editor in chief for the college newspaper, and developed a social circle rooted in that paper. Early summer weather was finally moving into western New York that mid-May, and The Matrix Reloaded had just hit theaters.

That last tidbit probably shouldn’t register amongst everything else that was exciting and that was good going on in my life at that moment. However, The Matrix had been a special film for me, in that totally un-ironic way in which a sleek dystopian sci-fi flic can only register with you at a certain time in your life. I was a kid who’d grown up on Star Wars and Star Trek, but felt my attention wane from each as I got toward the latter stages of high school. The Matrix was exactly the sort of mind-bending unfamiliar brand of sci-fi, made just mainstream enough via special effects and a Hollywood cast to fully capture my imagination in that particular stage of life.

That there would be a second Matrix film? That blew my mind.

The release of that second film lining up with the end of the school year was particularly serendipitous and a whole crew of us made our way to the movies for the discounted late night Friday screenings the local theater put on for college students. I went so far as to wear my long dark pea coat and sunglasses to pose like Neo in the lobby—I actually had some strangers taking pictures, while my friends did their best to act they didn’t know me.

The movie was only so-so—I think I liked it better than the film deserved on account of coming in so hyped up, and for the surrounding pleasure of having good friends all around me. After the screening, we made our way a couple doors down to Denny’s for late-night breakfast foods.

At that time, I had never asked a server to arrange any happy birthday hoopla for anyone. Whether it was this feeling of confidence that stems from good friends, the buzz of the film, or simply that I’d broached some invisible barrier between the kinds of people in the sweet spot of adult enough and juvenile to make that ask, I pulled the waiter aside and asked if we could do something special for my friend Kevin, not on his birthday, but a fair enough approximation, a week or two in advance.

Kevin was one of my favorite people--a bit older, a transfer who found himself in the same newspaper office, and in the same dorm where most of my friends lived. He had an appreciation for literature and for the absurd, both qualities that made me like him straightaway. Better yet, the night I inadvertently introduced him to my friend Emily from my freshman dorm would turn out to be the night that began their courtship, which would give way to their wedding a decade or so later.

And on that night, in that Denny’s, our skinny, gawkish teenage waiter returned to our table solo and asked, “Which one of you is Kevin?”

After Kevin had identified himself, the waiter made his way to him and, without accompaniment or back up of any kind, began to sing “Happy Birthday.” It was a such a profoundly awkward moment so as to become the stuff of immediate lore in our friend group.

I write all of this, waxing nostalgic shortly removed from another birthday for Kevin, now over sixteen years removed from that night. At the time, I felt a sense of standing at the beginning of things, and a sense that the way things were in that moment would not change. True to form, Kevin would return to visit with Emily and the rest of us over the next two years; particularly senior year, when she and I shared an apartment, I got to see him at least once a month. More stayed the same than changed those next couple years, and even the year after that, Kevin and Emily stopped in to stay with me for a weekend, and a group of us would return to our old college stomping grounds one alumni weekend.

But time marches on and lives change. I’d move to Baltimore, and Kevin and Emily would live at varying degrees of long distance from one another before settling in the Midwest together. I think I may have seen them a time or two again when we each wound up in Western New York between Christmas and New Year’s.

I know with more certainty that we went a period closer to five years without getting together.

I suppose that’s the nature of growing up, particularly for people who don’t stay put in the same area they grew up in or where they went to school. I was there for their wedding and they were there for mine. On one of my cross-country moves, I parked the U-Haul outside their apartment building for a night, and we got to grab dinner.

I suppose this is all to say the most remarkable truism about friendships—that they may come and go, but the good ones have the tendency to come back around again, for however short a visit after however long a time, often as not without missing a beat.

There are those people who have a tendency to get lost in their own nostalgia, focused on friends they once had and world they once lived in, rather than participating in the communities right at their disposal, right at that moment. I know myself to have been guilty of all of this more than once, particularly in those transitional phases after moves. I recall my childhood now, and feeling confused at my parents not having social lives outside the house to speak of--a way of being in the world that I can now all to readily see myself slipping into. And I think, if not for me, then for my son, of the importance of keeping people in our lives--family and friends who visit for sure, but also people in the here and now.

I also know it’s been too long since I’ve last watched The Matrix.

And that I can’t wait to show it to Riley.