Somebody, Somebody, Can Anybody Find Me Somebody To Love?

--"Somebody to Love", Queen

Last week my Boston Mojo lost to Breanne's Atlanta Hellfire by five measly points. Normally, whenever we face each other in the field of the battle the customary wager has always been one hundred. Yet, since I was so overconfident my team would prevail in the end, I upped the bet to five hundred last week. For those of you who don't know, that's the largest wager I've ever lost to Breanne--or anyone else for that matter. I normally don't go around throwing money after any sports team, even if it was comprised mostly of my beloved Red Sox. It's just not something I get that impassioned about enough to risk. Honestly, I think it was just the coupling of besting Lucy once more with the fact that I was ahead halfway through the week that caused me to lose my head for a moment. Losing hundred is bad enough, but losing five hundred is just plain depressing.

However, I'm not in the least bit bitter about it. I don't mind really losing to her.

It's because I know somewhere deep down that it's not really losing to her; it's more like I'm paying her back. Slowly. The crux of the matter is that five years ago she was kind enough to offer me three thousand dollars to borrow when I had filed for bankruptcy and wasn't working. I've only ever been able to pay her back about twelve hundred of it. She's never once bitched and moaned about getting the remaining eighteen hundred back to her right away. She's hardly even brought it up again--if and when she has, it's only to sass me about it. In the history of our friendship it's definitely the greatest single act of trust she's ever done for me. If she never did anything else from this point forward or if she had never done anything else for me previously, it would still earn her the distinction as being the friendship I cherish the most.

----

I was discussing at work how it surprised me that my friends from St. Rita's, Tommy and John, still knew each other. It surprised me because, there but for the grace of God, those two would have been my oldest friends if we hadn't drifted apart. I mean--I knew those two since the early 80's, at least ten years before I would meet Jina, Breanne, Dan, and Peter, or anyone else I would ever meet at La Salle. If we hadn't drifted apart, we would have been halfway through our third decade of knowing each other.

I admit it. There was a time there where I thought we'd always be friends. Tommy, John, Paul, and Phillip were the only friends I knew the entire time I was in elementary school. I was friendly with a lot of people--Jennifer, Casey, and Stephanie come to mind--but those four guys were the only ones I considered friends. It's kind off-putting that the first friends you usually make in life almost always never last. Just taken a sample poll of people at my work and people I know, almost no one is still friends with people from their elementary class after you reach a certain age. Almost no one has had the patience and fortitude to maintain a strong ongoing relationship that long.

My question has always been, though, even if you stay friends with someone that long, does that make for a better friend? Does duration count more than quality? For instance, if I had stayed friends with John or Tommy all these years, would I know be calling them my best friends instead of Little Miss Chipper? Or, say I got my dream of befriending someone like Rachel, and they were killed within months of getting to know them--would the fact that we only knew each other for those few months detract from the closeness we did feel?

I don't know--I've always been interested in the debate of whether length or compatibility matters most for qualifying one as someone's dearest friend. It's why my novel centers around a guy whose first love was killed in sixth grade after they'd only spent one summer together and how that relationship has become the relationship by which he judges all others, including his marriage. Thirty years later all he can see was how his one perfect relationship was tragically cut short before it had a chance to really blossom.

That's how I feel sometimes. There's people that I've known longer than dirt itself, but with whom I've never felt really close. And there's been people I've always just instantly clicked with it. In almost every situation it's been the latter group whom I felt genuinely were my dearest friends.

I guess what I'm saying is it isn't the fact that she loaned me all that money all those years ago that makes me consider Breanne my number one. It's the fact that she probably would have helped me to that same degree had I asked her within the first week of knowing her. It's the fact that I believe in the chemistry we have together so much that it wouldn't matter if I met her in '84 or 2014, we still would have be joined at the hip eventually. Some people I might have spent more face time with and some people I might have been through more with it in sheer numbers. But there's something to be said about how well a person makes you feel whenever you get the chance to be around them or spend any kind of time with them.

It's like she says, "I'd much rather have a minute in the sun than a day out when it's cloudy, you know?" Most people are going to be cloudy days. It's only a select few that are going to be minutes in the sunshine.

Or to put it another way, there's a lot of people I get really annoyed when I lose a five dollar bet to them, but there's only one person in the world that I can fork over five hundred dollars to and still smile about it. Only one.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers