The Rooster and The Chicken

My three year old son has a new best friend. This he announced moments ago, after finishing his oatmeal, racing to his room and emerging with a small rooster figurine given to him as a baby gift; a symbol of the Chinese calendar year of his birth. "This my new best friend," he said, holding it aloft.

I am unimpressed. Twenty minutes from now he will have moved on to a new devoted pal, the rooster relegated to some corner of the house to be batted mercilessly by the cat. My boy's fickleness regarding his devotions has been ongoing for the last six months or so, ever since he encountered the concept of "best friend", most likely through the pairing of the ubiquitous Elmo and Telly. Throughout the course of a day the kid will effortlessly shift his allegiance from me to his mother to his sister to the stuffed Corduroy Bear that resides on his bed. He will proclaim to all listening his love for whatever his whims dictate at that moment.

Sometimes, hinting of the manipulations that will soon become more common, he will pick a best friend in order to curry favor. Seeking a cookie or another episode of Caillou, he will snuggle up to me or his mom and whisper, "You my best friend." While charming, it's still blatantly transparent and rarely effective. Most of the time, however, his announcements of mon meilleur ami are genuine, his affection for a person or object enviably boundless, but for his spastic attention span.

Besides the obvious one-sided nature inherent in choosing stuffed animals as one's best friends, I have also tried to discuss with him the concept of friendship. I have explained that a best friend should not be subject to the vagaries of mood or convenience, that a best friendship has intrinsic permanence and requires nurture and dedication. He nods dutifully, says yes, and then toddles off to choose another upon whom he will bestow his affection.

I have had several best friends over the course of my life and Chuck was my first. Sprouting from the mutual defense of a playground tower against cootie-infested girls, we became devoted to one another. Shared lunches, birthdays and mutual admiration for the awe-inspiring, boot camp tales delivered by his older, Vietnam-bound brother served to reinforce our bond. When Chuck moved away to St. Louis I felt an immense loss and fell into a funk that lasted months. I was seven but I knew the taste of what friendship could be - should be.

There were others throughout childhood. I can remember all their names and almost all of the first encounters. Some clicked instantly; some grew more slowly, our shared interests and similar senses of humor eventually overwhelming the initial wariness. As I grew older I became more selective. Driven by a general misanthropy that is part of my nature, I preferred to nurture a small coterie of sometimes eccentric pals. I just found them more interesting. I still have a small group of very close friends - best friends - friends I can trust to entertain, enlighten and invigorate me. They can also be trusted to be honest, sometimes brutally, for that is one of the requirements.

Mark and I met while slaving in a record store right after college. He has, over the years, expressed qualities I admired and coveted, from his effortless wanderlust to his unique artistic abilities. We have been roommates. We have traveled the country in a pickup truck, rolling ten thousand miles onto the odometer one summer. We have written songs together, created unsold sitcom plots, dabbled in photography, and worked the graveyard shift behind the counter of a convenience store. We have generally seen more together than we have alone. He once saved my life though I think he would scoff at the idea. Our separate paths have led us to our respective marriages and fatherhoods relatively late in life and that too, has strengthened our friendship. More than once I have defined a perfect moment as a warm summer evening, a wooden porch, and the sound of Mark's guitar. Differences exist. I, for example, am agnostic; he is now an orthodox priest. He is conservative; I am not. His faith defines his life; my lack of faith defines mine. Nonetheless, our friendship endures and deepens as we age.


Greg and I crossed paths because my girlfriend and his partner were best pals. In my early twenties I was not prepared for a friendship that slowly insinuates its way into one’s life, tangling itself so tightly into your being that you can not remember a time when it did not exist. Sparked by a shopping trip for pants, pants that he can still wear but I have long since overflowed, the two of us eased into a brotherhood. Over the years it has waxed and waned but never lost its warmth. Having better taste in both appearance and demeanor than I, Greg has tolerated my slovenly ways and poor choices in life and looks. When that early girlfriend and I split after several years together and I wallowed in the failure to understand what had gone wrong, it was Greg who unflinchingly cut through my wailing. Insightfully pointing out that she and I didn’t belong together in the first place, he told me that as a result of the squabbles and misery he had endured in our company he had long ago decided to enjoy us individually rather than suffer us as a pair. Though I doubt he considers himself a writer, his ability to toss off phrases of remarkable poetry, precision and economy has often sent me into spasms of envy. I have told my wife that if I were gay I would simultaneously fight for same-sex marriage (more than I already do) and lobby Greg to walk down the aisle with me. His honesty and occasional curmudgeonly ways mean that much to me.


My most recent friendship (if one can call fifteen years ago recent) began frantically, almost desperately. Trapped in a small, extraordinarily provincial town I met Scott in a video store. Small talk led to mixed-tape exchanges and breathless conversations. His girlfriend laughingly described it as homo-erotic. Over the years our lives have followed an eerily similar course, from employment to our mutual battles with depression. Even now as he embarks on his road to fatherhood the lateness of that step mirrors my own. The relationship has been held together in recent years with text messages and two line emails, mixed tapes and voicemails, rather than heart-to-hearts. Initially I was uncomfortable with that method of maintenance. I felt slighted, somehow. But Scott has taught me the beauty of distance and shorthand; the idea that connection is not always about immediacy, but can be sustained with simple patience and faith.

Then there is my oldest friend. From high school through college, over the course of thirty years it was the easiest friendship of them all. A phone call would begin as if we had been speaking ten minutes earlier. A visit would be as comfortable as an old chair. An argument would resolve itself in laughter. We could shoot baskets all afternoon and then drink beer and make baklava while our mates pondered our idiocy from a distance. We were truly best friends, but somehow, in some inexplicable way, it is no more. Perhaps it is something I said or did. Perhaps, after years of trying to have children without success, he and his wife felt an acute sense of bitterness when my wife and I announced our pregnancy. I just don’t know what happened, but whatever the cause, this friendship has ended without a word from him to explain the collapse. For two years my emails have gone unanswered, voicemails unreturned, and when I did catch him on the phone the conversation was cold and abrupt. When I discovered last week that he and his wife had sold their home and moved nearly eight months ago to whereabouts unknown to me I could only conclude that he had chosen to walk away. It's an action I would never have expected from him and that makes it all the more curious. How does something like that happen? How does one not at least offer an explanation? How do thirty years evaporate with nary a trace left behind?

My son has abandoned the rooster. I found it on the coffee table lying on its side. I can hear him in his room now. He is carrying on an imaginary conversation with a stuffed animal. I believe it’s a frog.

I want to go in there right now and tell him about friendships again; to make certain he comprehends it all. I want him to know how hard it is to make them last and how rewarding that can be. But I don't know if I comprehend it anymore. For my son there is time yet, and ultimately the clearest understanding of the intricacies and subtleties of these relationships will come from the friends he chooses and the happiness or sorrow that accompanies those choices.

He is laughing now, my son, trying to get the frog to ride in his toy school bus, and in between his giggles he is pronouncing his undying devotion to his new best friend.