Chance Encounters with V
The night before I left North Carolina to drive up I-95 to South Jersey, where I'm now visiting my parents, I discovered that one of my good friends from college, V, was going to be driving down I-95 in the opposite direction at the same time. We had to consult via cell phone several times to readjust due to traffic delays, but eventually we managed to meet off the interstate to grab a burger at the Chesapeake House . . . which (in spite of its elegant name) will be recognized by Baltimore residents and fellow travellers as a rest stop, albeit one outfitted with Burger King, Starbucks, and picnic benches.
My friendship with V has been almost entirely forged in chance encounters, yet there have been so many that it seems like more than happenstance, like the invisible hand's alignment of our clueless self-interest working (in this case) toward a common good, with a directive pat from Providence here and there. We became friends by eating breakfast together three days a week my senior year in college, acquaintances happening upon each other in the dining hall first by chance, then by offhand design. Still, we've both said that if we'd listed the people we most expected to keep in touch with after graduation, neither of us would have made the other's top twenty.
But at one point, when we were both working at rather mindless and isolated jobs, we got into the habit of emailing each other oh, about twenty times a day, as if we were gossipy co-workers a cubicle away. When V left the job for business school, he forwarded me his 500 favorite of our more than 2000 messages to each other, saying that they were a record of basically every thought one of us had had over the past few years. We occasionally saw each other in person too. Once, when I was visiting another friend the city where V lived (and things were not going well with that visit), I called V from a payphone in a mall, and when he heard my voice, he said with sudden compassion, "Hey, do you want me to come down there?"
Which is the real reason we're remained friends through 12 years, 6 states, 19 moves (between the two of us)--because V knows how to be a good friend . . . knows it somehow without a lot of sappy declarations or self-help-book talk about it, just knows it through his own instinctive decency and stand-up-guyness. From answering an email about a bad day with a hilarious description of one of his own, to telling me kindly and honestly that if I didn't get into grad school it would be because I wasn't smart enough (which somehow was a relief, not a disparagement), to leaving his phone's ringer on all night after I experienced a bad break-up in case I woke up scared.
To one day, when I arrived at his apartment, asking me gallantly, "Would you like some juice? I knew you were coming so I haven't even been drinking out of the carton."
My friendship with V has been almost entirely forged in chance encounters, yet there have been so many that it seems like more than happenstance, like the invisible hand's alignment of our clueless self-interest working (in this case) toward a common good, with a directive pat from Providence here and there. We became friends by eating breakfast together three days a week my senior year in college, acquaintances happening upon each other in the dining hall first by chance, then by offhand design. Still, we've both said that if we'd listed the people we most expected to keep in touch with after graduation, neither of us would have made the other's top twenty.
But at one point, when we were both working at rather mindless and isolated jobs, we got into the habit of emailing each other oh, about twenty times a day, as if we were gossipy co-workers a cubicle away. When V left the job for business school, he forwarded me his 500 favorite of our more than 2000 messages to each other, saying that they were a record of basically every thought one of us had had over the past few years. We occasionally saw each other in person too. Once, when I was visiting another friend the city where V lived (and things were not going well with that visit), I called V from a payphone in a mall, and when he heard my voice, he said with sudden compassion, "Hey, do you want me to come down there?"
Which is the real reason we're remained friends through 12 years, 6 states, 19 moves (between the two of us)--because V knows how to be a good friend . . . knows it somehow without a lot of sappy declarations or self-help-book talk about it, just knows it through his own instinctive decency and stand-up-guyness. From answering an email about a bad day with a hilarious description of one of his own, to telling me kindly and honestly that if I didn't get into grad school it would be because I wasn't smart enough (which somehow was a relief, not a disparagement), to leaving his phone's ringer on all night after I experienced a bad break-up in case I woke up scared.
To one day, when I arrived at his apartment, asking me gallantly, "Would you like some juice? I knew you were coming so I haven't even been drinking out of the carton."
posted by Tara | 10:57 AM
1 Comments:
HA HAAAAA! Men.
Well, at least he's honest.
I'm beginning to think that friendship's qualities (putting them in definable terms, anyway -- not experiencing them) are a lot more elusive than even romantic love. And we all know how slippery THAT one is!
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