With everyone dispersed throughout the country, we still play poker remotely once a month.
Same game we started college in the mid eighties, with some interruptions along the way for careers, travel and babies and one stretch where we mostly let it go. Same seats, in the sense that everyone sits where they have always sat. Nobody ever decided that. Nobody has ever violated it either.
Here is the part I cannot get over. It feels like yesterday. Not in a soft, sentimental way. In a literal, slightly alarming way.
The same jokes go around that table in roughly the same order. The same guy delivers a punchline he has now delivered for four decades and he still waits for the laugh, and he still gets it, and it is not because the joke is funny. The same three ridiculous stories come out, and they have grown in the retelling, and everybody knows they have grown, and nobody corrects them, because the embellishment is the point now. The story stopped being a story a long time ago. It is a shared possession.
Somebody will start one I have heard two hundred times and I will still lean in.
There is also a group text on my phone that has been running, in one form or another, since before any of us had a phone.
It started as a landline in a hallway with a cord long enough to reach two rooms. Then it was letters, actual letters, the kind you had to stamp. Then email, then a text thread, and now whatever app one of us has decided we are all using this year.
The format keeps changing. The people have not.
Forty years. That is what forty years of friendship looks like on a Wednesday night. Not profound. Just constant.
I want to write down what I have gotten out of it, because I do not think anyone told me at twenty one that the fraternity would end up being one of the better decisions of my life. It did not feel like a decision. It felt like laziness, honestly, the failure to properly move on.
They knew you before you were anybody
Here is what almost nobody in your adult life has: a memory of you from before you had a title.
Everyone I have met in the last thirty years met a version of me that was already assembled. They met a guy with a resume, a business card, a job, a story about himself that had been sanded smooth by repetition. That version is fine. It is also a little bit of a performance, and after enough years you can forget you are giving one.
My college friends missed all of that. They knew me when I had no money, undecided, wrong about almost everything, and extremely confident about all of it. Some of them especially remember the girlfriend who was clearly a bad idea. They remember me announcing career plans that never happened. They were there for the semester I should not talk about.
And because they knew that guy, they are completely unimpressed by this one. That turns out to be a gift. There is nowhere else in my life where I get to be exactly as interesting as I actually am and no more.
I have sat in rooms in four countries where the whole job was to be credible. Coming home to people who will not let you be credible is a form of rest I have never found anywhere else LOL
The permission to be unimpressive
Adult friendship, the kind you make at forty five or fifty five, usually starts sideways. Your kids play together. You work together. You are on the same board, in the same neighborhood, at the same gym. There is a context holding it up, and the friendship tends to stay inside the shape of that context.
Which means there is a mild, ongoing effort involved. You are a little bit on. You keep score of who hosted last. You are careful.
Forty year friendships have no shape left to keep. There is nothing to protect and no version of me to maintain. I can call one of these guys on a Sunday, say nothing of consequence for eleven minutes, and hang up feeling better. Nobody asks why I called. Nobody wonders what it means.
The best measure I know of a long friendship is how comfortable you both are with a boring conversation.
The same stupid joke, for the four hundredth time
I want to come back to the poker game, because I think the monthly part of it is doing more work than any of us realized when we started.
A standing game removes the need to decide anything. Nobody has to organize it. Nobody has to feel out whether everyone is up for it this month, or find a date, or be the one who suggests it and risk the silence afterward. It is just on. It recurs. It has the sturdiness of a thing that does not require anybody’s enthusiasm to survive, and over forty years that turns out to matter far more than enthusiasm.
I have watched a lot of good groups quietly dissolve because getting together stayed optional. Ours survived because at some point it stopped being a plan and became a fact.
And then there are the jokes.
They are not funny. I want to be honest about that. Most of them were marginal in 1986 and time has not helped. But they are not doing comedy anymore, they are doing something else. They are a password. When the guy on my left says the line he has said a thousand times, what he is actually saying is I am still here, you are still here, and none of this has changed as much as the mirror suggests.
The stories work the same way. There are maybe five of them in heavy rotation. Everyone at that table could recite all five. We tell them anyway, and we tell them to each other, not to any newcomer who needs the background. That is the strange and lovely part. The audience already knows.
Something else happens at a table like that, and it happens sideways. Nobody makes a phone call to announce that their marriage is in trouble, or that a scan came back wrong, or that the job is gone. It comes out somewhere between two hands, said to the table without being said to anyone, and then it is known, and nobody had to work up the nerve for a conversation. The card game is the cover story. Forty years of cover story has carried an enormous amount of real freight.
If you have a group and it has gone thin, this is the only advice I have that I actually believe: put something on the calendar that repeats. Not a reunion. A recurrence. The date does the work that none of you will reliably do.
They hold the parts of your life you cannot hold yourself
This is the one I did not see coming, and it is the one I would tell a twenty two year old about first.
Your memory of your own life is much worse than you think. Whole years compress into a single anecdote. The specifics go first, then the order of things, then eventually whether it happened at all.
These friends are a backup drive.
Someone will bring up a night I have completely lost, and it comes back in full color, and I get an afternoon of my own youth handed back to me for free. Sometimes their version is different from mine, and we argue about it, and the argument itself is thirty years old and comfortable, like a chair that has taken your shape.
Nobody else can do this. My fiance cannot, she was not there. My kids cannot, they were not born. My colleagues cannot. Only the people who were in the building.
Losing touch with them is not just losing the people. It is losing access to your own material.
The funerals, and the hospital parking lots
I am not going to pretend the last decade has been all couch photos.
We have buried parents. Most of us, by now, all of us. We have driven long distances to stand in the back of churches. There have been divorces, some of them ugly, and one of them I watched happen in slow motion over eighteen months of phone calls. There have been diagnoses. There has been a stretch where one of us went quiet for most of a year, and the rest of us took turns calling anyway, leaving voicemails into what felt like a well, until one day he picked up.
Here is what I learned in those years. In the worst weeks of your life you do not want new friends. New friends require explanation. You have to give them background, establish context, manage their reaction, thank them for their concern.
Old friends need none of that. They walk in already knowing your father. They know what he was like, what he was like to you specifically, and what it is going to cost you. You do not have to build the case. You just have to open the door.
Forty years of unremarkable maintenance buys you exactly one thing, and it is that. Somebody who can show up without needing to be briefed.
What it actually costs
Almost nothing, and this is the part I find funny.
People treat old friendships like they require some grand annual pilgrimage. They do not. Ours has survived on a level of effort that would embarrass a houseplant.
A text about a football game. A photo of a bad meal. A phone call in the car because the drive is long anyway. One weekend somewhere, not every year, and never everyone. A voice memo instead of a typed reply. The birthday call that we all forget half the time, and nobody minds.
The trick is not intensity. It is refusing to let the thread go fully dark. You cannot keep a fire going all year, but you can keep a coal.
The one thing that has mattered more than any of the rest: somebody has to be willing to be the annoying one. Every group like this has a person who starts the thread, floats the dates, keeps proposing the trip nobody commits to until suddenly four people commit to it. For a long stretch that was not me and I benefited enormously from somebody else’s effort. These days I try to take my turn. If your old group has gone quiet, there is a decent chance it is not dead. It is just waiting for someone to be the annoying one.
If you have let it go quiet
You have not missed the window. I promise you have not.
The nature of these friendships is that they do not expire, they just idle. Ten years of silence is not a wall, it is a pause, and it is broken by something as small as a photograph with no caption. I have watched it work more than once.
You do not need an occasion or an apology or an explanation for the gap. Nobody wants the explanation. Send the picture. Send the one line. "Thought of you today, no reason." It is not awkward for nearly as long as you think it will be, and on the other end of it is someone who has been meaning to do the same thing and also felt weird about it.
The couch
Somebody eventually answered the question about the couch. It was, allegedly, a guy who is now a very serious person with a very serious job, and I want to be clear that I have no independent confirmation of this.
He denied it in about four seconds. Nobody believed him. He knew nobody would believe him. That was the whole point of denying it.
Forty years in, that is what I have. A handful of people who remember the couch, remember me, will not let me get away with anything, and will be in the back of the church when I need them to be.
Some of them I only reach by phone now. Some of them I will see next month, in the same seats, listening to the same three stories get a little bigger. Maybe on a foreign island.
I would not trade it for anything I have built. Some of what I have built came out of it.
