COMMENTARY: On friendship

I purposefully maintain a small circle of friends because I value deep, meaningful connections. Also, I’m terrible at remembering names.

Since when is remembering someone’s name a prerequisite for friendship? When I was a kid, I used to be friends with the bus driver. We gave each other Christmas presents. All the bus driver knew was that I was the kid who lived at the end of a cul-de-sac that made turning the bus incredibly annoying, and all I knew was that the bus driver had an epic beard that made him look like Santa.

Getting to talk to Santa every day when I got on the bus was nearly as good as getting presents. Whenever Santa said, “Wake up. It’s your stop,” I knew I was in the presence of a true pal. Santa wouldn’t let me ride the bus all the way to the end of the route (which was presumably in Antarctica). He would drop me off at home, every time.

I was also the kid who was chums with the cafeteria lady. I never knew her name for sure, but I think it might have been Nicole. Or Colette. Or Ettie. One of the three. One time, I stacked dominoes on the floor and let her push them over. They fell in a perfect swirly pattern. As thanks, she let me have a cookie for free from the cafeteria.

What a wonderful friend. I still remember how delicious that chocolate chip cookie was. Unfortunately, I don’t remember much of Nicole. Or Colette. Or possibly Ettie.

As I grew older, my circle of friends didn’t increase much. I made friends with my neighbor George, who became a nuclear engineer and moved to Tennessee (not necessarily in that order).

I hope that means I’ll still see him from time to time, if he’s not battling giant radioactive lizards.

I also made friends with a girl named Jessica, a civil engineer. She’s working now on building hospitals. I hope never to find myself in one, no matter how well-built it is.

My pal Roop is a history mastermind, able to tell fantastic stories about real-life people.

I have my friend Kenny, a philosopher in the truest sense of the word, who is the only person I know who can combine subjects such as computer architecture and the French Revolution in one sentence.

And that’s it. Those are all my friends. The fantastic four. Beyond that stretches a hazy circle of acquaintances and colleagues whose names are, more or less, completely lost to me.

Since when did we start thinking of friendships in terms of quantity, rather than quality? Social media sites let you have hundreds of friends or followers, but no way to distinguish special friends, or real friends, from the masses.

Maybe it’s time we re-evaluated our friendships. Maybe it’s time to reach out to your true friends and leave the false ones behind. Maybe it’s time to say hello to a cafeteria lady or give a high-five to a bus driver, tell a cashier her hair looks amazing, or compliment the janitor’s baseball cap.

Random acts of kindness can ignite real and warm friendships, friends we remember long after they pass out of our lives, as friends almost inevitably do.

But I hope the friends you make stick around. I hope they make your life awesome and annoying, beautiful and strange, and all too human.

Here’s to friendship. May it last.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. She writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Newspaper Syndicate.