FWe went to a rock concert a while ago. Don’t envision us with thousands at Aloha Stadium for Bruno Mars. Think a crowd of fifty in Hawaii Public Radio’s Atherton Studio for a concert by Beat-lele, a Beatles’ tribute band. They play great versions of all of the Fab Four’s music on electric ukulele. For two hours, we bathed in the Beatles, from “Help” to “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Hey, Jude” to “I Get by with a Little Help from my Friends.”
To us in the room, the songs were friends of long-standing, remarkable signposts for our lives in the 1960s. I remarked to the drummer (who played rhythm on a box on which he sat and two cymbals) that he looked like he was having too much fun.
“Hey, it’s the Beatles,” he replied, and I understood.
A couple of days later, we watched an old friend of a movie, “Finding Forrester,” released in 2000. It tells the story of a very bright African American teenager who meets up with a reclusive Pulitzer Prize winning author, the prize book being the only one he published.
“Forrester” is a feel-good movie, through to the rolling of the credits which roll to Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, better known as Iz, Hawaii’s own, singing his version of the “Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World” combo song.
“Forrester” is also a thoughtful portrayal of friendship, on many levels. Each of the main characters finds a missing piece of life as they open up to another person who, in the end, becomes a friend. No one takes more than he or she gives.
You and I are blessed when we have such friends. I am doubly blessed to live with what the younger set would call my BFF.
I also have a lifetime collection of friends-in-absentia. You do, too. Some of you are on the receiving end of my musings; friends from years ago and miles away who, nonetheless, are characters in the play that is my life. Just recalling playing basketball in the gym on Oregon Street in San Diego or as the “Over-The-Hill” gang in the UCR gym, cruising Oscar’s for burgers and fries in a green and white ’56 Chevy, or tasting wines in the Napa Valley with my boss and his wife one spring makes memories of old friends into friends themselves.
I confess to thinking that “friend” has been co-opted in a world of ever-present social media stimulation. (Curmudgeon alert!) Contact? Sure. Acquaintance? Better than friend but still a bit familiar. And to top it all off! The power to “un-friend!” In a face-to-face world, one would just stop seeing somebody. One would not consciously brand a person as “unfriended.” It sounds so cruel!
I have written before about Dad’s “adventures in friendship.” His adventures were usually unanticipated, unscripted, and often limited, in terms of the number of times he would meet the other person. I think he used the term friendship because such encounters generally involved the sharing of stories, giving each party a more-than-passing glimpse of the other’s life experiences and attitudes, face-to-face.
Sometimes a first encounter led to others with unexpected outcomes. Dad used to go over to Grossmont Center, near home, to get coffee, write poetry, and watch people. One adventure in friendship was with an Egyptian immigrant who managed a jewelry shop. The man ended up renting the small apartment attached to my parents’ house until he could save enough money to get a larger place and contemplate marriage.
At his core, I think Dad would have aspired to the idea described in the last two lines of the poem that hangs, framed, on the wall in our entry.
“Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.”
Like me with my friends, the Beatles and Forrester, Dad had poems and hymns that were familiar comforts sure to raise his spirits. I daresay, People of a Certain Age, that you do, too. In such friends there is certainty and security; no one can un-make the Beatles’ body of work or the Forrester film.
That security is important because flesh and blood, living friends can sometimes “un-friend” in an unfriendly and devastating manner. It was “friends” of Dad’s in the one church who turned on him and split the congregation. It was a “friend” of Dad’s from their service club who persuaded Dad to place my parents’ life savings with him at his brokerage firm and proceeded to churn profits for himself, resulting in a total loss for Mom and Dad.
In the realm of friendship, there are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Unrequited friendship hurts.
Forrester rediscovered friendship, albeit late in his life. The Beatles have not been alone in getting by with a little help from their friends. Most of Dad’s adventures turned out well, well enough for him to look for them until he died.
There are no guarantees about friendship except, possibly, that a life without friends, be they songs or films or poems or people, would seem incomplete.
Daniel E. White
February 13, 2019