Friend And Foe Pdf
Carri Seargent
People often distinguish between an acquaintance and a friend, holding that the former should be used primarily to refer to someone with whom one is not especially close. Many of the earliest uses of acquaintance were in fact in reference to a person with whom one was very close, but the word is now generally reserved for those who are known only slightly.
Acquaintance is often found paired with nodding. Although nodding acquaintance sounds like it describes a person who is known just enough to nod at, it tends to be used instead to refer to a thing or field with which one has a small amount of knowledge or familiarity (and this is the meaning that the phrase has had since its introduction to the language in the early 19th century).
As the husband of my best friend, he was no stranger, but he was usually peripheral. Then 10 years ago, my friend got lung cancer. I watched during visits, stunned at how nurturing Ty could be, taking care of her even though they had separated years before at her request.
Another three years passed, broken only by news of his third granddaughter and my memories of how good it felt to be with him. Alert to his attentiveness, but unsettled by both his remove and my growing interest, I risked reaching out again, this time about remodeling my garage.
I was grateful for his help but unsure over what sort of friendship we were developing, at least from his point of view. I, however, was clear. I wanted him to wrap his long arms around me, tell me sweet things and make me his.
We dined in the dusk of late summer. Our talk was easy. Discomfort lay in the unspoken. Anxious for clarity, I repeatedly let my hand linger near the candle flickering in the middle of our table. It remained untouched.
Two weeks later, Ty did email, suggesting an early evening hike in Tuna Canyon in Malibu. The setting was perfect. Sun sparkled off the ocean. A gentle breeze blew. We climbed uphill for sweeping coastal vistas and circled down to the shade of live oaks, touching only when he took my hand to steady me where the path was slippery. At the end of the trail, overlooking the juncture between the mountains and the sea, we stood opposite each other and talked animatedly for almost an hour, both of us reluctant to part.
A few weeks later, at his suggestion, we were back at Tuna Canyon. This time Ty did invite me to end the evening at his house. Sitting close on his couch, but not too close, we drifted toward each other in the darkening room. His shoulder brushed mine reaching for his cup of coffee. My hip pressed his as I leaned in for my tea. Slowly, sharing wishes and hopes for our remaining years, we became shadows in the light of the moon. And in that darkness, in that illuminated space, he reached out.
I went to college in NYC so my perspective on friendship there is a bit different. Our favorite activity during the day (this was the 1970s) was sitting in a coffee shop ordering successive cheap food and just yakking. Or we walked up Madison Ave on our way to the Met, looking in windows, back when it wasn't all chain and designer stores. In late middle age I have a lot of friends, but even pre-Covid most of them live elsewhere, and the ones nearby have a predilection for "doing" and "activities" and not hanging out. I've welcomed Covid as meaning, well, we can't do that, we have to sit on the front porch with blankets piled up and just talk.
My oldest friend from childhood and I were apart for 20+ years and then in our 40s she rather miraculously and accidentally wound up moving to the same town where I live now. We would sit and talk for hours in my living room or hers, and it was such a gift to be with someone who knew me (and her) in such depth. She had to move again to take care of her very elderly mother, and do I ever miss that idle hanging out, talking about what we were reading, watching, cooking, thinking, wishing, hoping, listening to, wearing, people around us, etc. etc.
Alright: we need to go to the post office and drop off a package, go to two different grocery stores for what we\u2019re making for dinner, return something at the outdoor mall with the annoying parking, but while we\u2019re there, we can get a coffee in the middle of the day for no reason and also go to the candy store, and maybe just pop into that other mall store and mindlessly browse for a bit, and then we\u2019ll come home, eat the candy we just bought, and watch the first half of Leap Year.
This is what you do with the Errand Friend: errands and the rest of your life. You probably have different routines with your errand friends, but here is a short list of things I have done with mine: waited in the lobby during a dental cleaning; picked up dry cleaning; helped address wedding thank-you notes; made an elaborate dessert for a Mother\u2019s Day celebration I wasn\u2019t actually attending; folded laundry; got the oil on the car changed; tagged along on preschool pickup; deposited checks at an ATM; picked up a gift certificate for someone\u2019s coworker.
There are so many more, but I don\u2019t remember them because like most of the stuff you do with an Errand Friend, it\u2019s unremarkable. It\u2019s just life, but with another person there. I tried to look for a picture from my past to accompany this post, but there was nothing to be found. You take photos of special events, of dinners, of nights out and camping trips and hikes and weddings and dress-up costumes. You don\u2019t take a photo when you\u2019re in Target browsing dishtowels for the seventeenth time.
Peak Errand Friendship time is probably college, when you develop very close friendships with people who are in close proximity to you all the time, but don\u2019t have a ton of obligations to keep you from accompanying someone on their errands. I cannot count the number of times one of my friends said \u201CI need to go get something at the SUB\u201D (student union building) and I said \u201Coh I\u2019ll come.\u201D Did I need to make a ten minute walk across campus? Of course not! But why not check your campus mail and buy a Laffy Taffy for 10 cents at the bookstore? WHY NOT?
Errand friendship requires time but no planning. You just join someone on their life trajectory for awhile. You might get something done along the way, but the focus isn\u2019t your own productivity.
I think this sort of friendship is often gendered: women stereotypically do a lot of errands and housework; women love to just hang out and chat. But men do this too, they just do it with sports in the background. Those hangouts are somewhat more appointment based, but when there\u2019s three football games on over the course of a day, you can kinda just agree to show up. Same with playing golf: oh, you wanna just spend like four hours walking and talking??? You know what? Men also love to hang out and talk. Intimacy is for everyone.
When I lived in New York, I felt helpless to make friends. I hated \u201Cgetting drinks\u201D after work with someone I\u2019d met once. I didn\u2019t want to have to constantly plan my friendships. I loved my work friends but they were my work friends. I missed my Errand Friends, which is another way of saying I missed intimacy.
You can do errands with a boyfriend or girlfriend or partner, but it\u2019s just not the same. The qualities of Errand Friendship are different. They\u2019re softer, somehow, more comfy. And because Errand Friendship is rarely planned, it never feels like an obligation, or something you dream of canceling to free up time to just exhale, because the best Errand Friendship time feels as restorative as time alone.
This is how we are meant to live: with each other, in and out of each other\u2019s lives, attending to one person\u2019s errands and daily routines and then, naturally, at some point in the future, the other\u2019s. I really do believe that. Granualized living isn\u2019t just more expensive and wasteful, it makes us feel worse. Why are we all making dinner every night, dealing with our own laundry, being uniquely responsible for cleaning the toilet, handling childcare ourselves or dividing it between two people, and waiting in line for the post office by ourselves? COVID, I get it. But what about before?
Everyone says this quarantine has been a reminder of how interconnected we all are, etc. etc. But we should be leaning into that bond \u2014 instead of allocating so much time and energy to carving out spaces and routines and productivity obsessions that actively resist it. Don\u2019t mistake me: I love being my myself, and will always need to find time for it. I feel like my weirdest, most purest self when I\u2019m alone, but I\u2019m my most relaxed, softest self when I\u2019m with my Errand Friends, talking about nothing and everything, living the un-Instagrammable parts of our lives. My memories of Errand Time always blur. But the feel of it is stronger than any special or scheduled event.
Before the pandemic, so many of us had transformed our lives into packed calendars capped off by meticulously planned but often incredibly distanced events: girls\u2019 nights, weekend trips, book clubs. The more scheduled you are, the less time you have for the actual restorative parts of being with one another. Because intimacy is built on honesty, but it is also built on time. The busiest times in my life, when I\u2019ve allocated the least time to these friendships, have also felt the least grounded. It\u2019s at once cruel and instructive that the thing that has forced us to actually stop over-scheduling our lives has also made it so difficult to share them with others.
There\u2019s so much I want to do when all of this is over. But one of the things I want to do the most is show up at a friend\u2019s house, drive around doing mundane shit, then go back to their place and do nothing, absolutely nothing at all.
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