June 2003

My Advice for Life
1993 Remembered

The weeks preceding my high school graduation were drenched in nervous anticipation of the future. We sent invitations to friends and family, celebrated our last Niska-Day, and took our last New York State Regents exams with the specter of our hopeful, yet uncertain futures in our periphery. For me, with my final track and field season at an end, the days were blessed with long, sunny afternoons filled with drug abuse, heavy petting and bridge jumping (my life was a Mountain Dew commercial some days.) For the most part, I had enjoyed high school, and it appeared to be ending with a flourish. As far as I could tell, June of 1993 was going to be just one big party.

I was mostly right.

Just like in the movies, I was required to have one momentous, life changing conversation about choices or something. I ended up having a bunch that could have been written better. At a time when a young person is concerned for his own future, these talks inevitable come up.

One of the most memorable pre-graduation conversations, short as it was, came on the day prior to our graduation. That day, all the seniors were bussed to Proctor's Theater for a rehearsal. Basically, we stood in line while someone told us where to stand and when to toss our caps. After the blah-blah-blah was over, we stood about for a few minutes until the busses returned. I was standing there talking with the class president, Joseph Robert Crimmins.

J.R. was not your average suburban high school student. He got good grades, played soccer and was class President, but he didn't mess around all that much. He ran with a good crowd of people which never threw, and almost never attended, parties with drugs and/or alcohol. He was friendly, well groomed and blonde. While I had known him since the sixth grade, we'd never been all that close. I never expected him to ask me for any kind of advice, but he did.

As with most of the conversations taking place in line that day, we talked about graduation. He did not waste time with the small talk, though, and went straight for the meat. Sincerely, he asked me, "Do you think it's possible to stay close with your friends after high school?" - Or, something to that effect. I don't know if he asked be because he thought of me as a wise person, or if he was collecting ideas from various sources in order to make what he thought was the best decision. At the time, I figured he actually wanted to know what I thought.

My answer, initially, could have been pretty grim.

You see, a few days earlier, my father and I had a similar conversation about life after graduation. I asked him if he had been able to keep in touch with any people from his high school days.

He didn't.

He urged me to lower my expectations. "You'll find in ten years that you've lost touch with those people. You'll move two of three times, as they will. What's more, you'll make new friends along the way, as they will, who will replace your old ones. Unless you live close to some of them, you should not expect to see them again."

Well, maybe he didn't say something that bleak, but it's basically what he said. Move on, he said. Now, this was in the days before the internet, so communication was by phone or regular mail, but I don't think his answer would be all that much different today.

As unpleasant as his advice sounded, I believed him. It made sense to me. I was going to leave home for another state soon, and after college, I could end up anywhere - that is, anywhere but my home town. I loved my friends, and I hoped and planned on seeing them as often as possible, and, in some cases, I still do. However, I do not regret the loss of contact with people from my past.

But back to J.R.'s question, and a serious one at that, so I needed to give him an answer. My first instinct in this situation was to help him make the best of a bad situation. I told him, in no uncertain terms, to lower his expectations. Second, I suggested that he fight the inevitable by reducing the number of friends worth keeping in touch with to a bare minimum. I advised he make a list of no greater than ten people with whom he could not do without. The list, I said, should have their college addresses, birthday and phone numbers, whatever.

I urged him to keep in regular contact with the people on that list: send birthday cards, random letters, and visit their parents when he's in town for short visits. It was up to him to make the effort, for the others may have little or no inclination as time passed. According to my theory, he would stand a chance at turning his high school friends into life-long companions.

I was shoveling shit.

To me, the courtesy of letter writing is the job of Victorian housewives and retirees, not college-bound eighteen year olds with studies and a life. Who could keep up such a pace? As I spoke to J.R., I knew in my heart and mind that I could and would not follow my own advice. As smart and dedicated as he may have been, I didn't think he could either.

Regardless, I am curious. My father's advice is largely self-fulfilling: If you make no effort, no one will make one in return. No one stays in touch by accident. Of course, J.R. may have taken my advice to heart. Maybe he communicated with his list of friends, and sees them on a regular basis.

Of all my memories of high school graduation, this is one of the most haunting, the most in need of 'closure.' As I said, I'm curious, but I'm not entirely certain that I want to know the answer.

I'm torn about it all, and it gets me back to my larger problem with having to leave home in the first place. So many people depart their home towns for various destination only to return for religious holidays and funerals, but never congregate with their old friends at the secular events which had once brought them so close. It's natural, and nothing should demand a person prolong a friendship formed in a domain not of one's choosing. Besides, nearly everything in your youth is exaggerated, including friendships. Later in life, your parents advice is vindicated, your intelligence is never as unique as it was, and your friends are not who they once seemed to be. Hell, it's a challenge to be the same person to everyone from one year to the next.

I may be exaggerating and/or simplifying my point too much here, but I'm trying to prove a point to myself. I should have never expected for anything to be permanent, for nothing ever is, and nothing, save darkness, will be.

Perception is a wonderful tool. Your misinterpretations, no matter how wrong, are not necessarily subject to the laws of logic and reason. You may age and you may change, but you can see yourself as no different if you choose. And, if you are mis-perceptive enough, you may never acknowledge similar changes in others that would otherwise not allow you to be friends as you once were.

Maybe I've been selling myself, and you all, short all these years by thinking that my advice to J.R. could not be followed by anyone but the desperate or the brave. Maybe being friends with another person is dependant on one's subjective reality - a combination of happy memories and the fear of being alone. Of course, the not so short extension from that belief is that all friendships (and, by yet another extension, love and hate) are equally subjective, thereby equally fragile and unstable. Of course, only as fragile and unstable as we allow ourselves to perceive.

Ungh. I got caught up in a philosophical tail-spin again, and I let my lack of faith in people blow up into a diatribe about man's inhumanity to himself. I suppose I've read too much into myself for my own good. I don't know for sure.

Every time I think about the advice I gave to J.R. on the day before graduation, I feel a little more guilty - mostly because my answer was not nearly as sincere his question. Oh well. One more log on the fire.