When a Friend Becomes an Acquaintance
Essay. Can a friendship last a lifetime?
You can listen to the beautiful narration of this story produced by Alex Essenburg.
Maybe it has also happened to you. A strong friendship fostered over the years devolves into a casual acquaintanceship. Not in an explosion of indignity from a terrible wrong or a petty squabble, but imperceptibly. It erodes without a clear reason and becomes an awkward presence hanging in your mind. A piece of personal story beyond saving.
I met Greg thirty years ago at a small hang gliding airport in Wisconsin, on a warm June day. He landed his hang glider and stood by it in warm pants and a frayed pullover sweater. A slight man of forty-eight, but looking no older than thirty to my young eighteen-year-old eyes, he was shivering from the residual cold of the altitude from his flight. The cold infused every cell of his body with a bitter chill, the kind impossible to defeat without a hot shower, whisky, or hot soup.
He was gulping bean chili from a styrofoam cup, shoveling it with a plastic spoon in a great hurry. A thick red line of chili mustache sat above his upper lip. His hair, two inches too long and electrified by the helmet, stuck out in a maniacal way. But his eyes looked at me with calm and mirthful curiosity.
“How was your flight?” I asked.
“Cold, but good. Easy today, thermals were wide and strong. Turbulent.”
Thermals are how hang gliders fly. The summer sun warms the air above dark fields and launches it skywards in a stream of chaotic bubbles. The bubbles coalesce with altitude into a single column of air rushing to the bottoms of clouds. Hang glider pilots surf those invisible breaths of the summer fields.
“Any problems with my airtow?” I asked him. Towing was my job. I flew an airplane pulling hang gliders behind me with a two hundred foot rope, up to two thousand feet when they released and soared.
“No, just followed your plane. Nice speed and smooth. No problems. Released from the tow line when I felt the thermal lift me, and climbed higher.”
Our bond was immediate.
From my perch as a middle-aged man today, I wonder how our friendship ignited. We were thirty years apart. I was starting life, and he had already lived through its many chapters. So little in common on the surface, but one thing — our passion for experience. Mine founded on the naïveté of youth, still unbroken by travails. His, already rebuilt from disillusionments.
Greg was an artist. He tried the regular working life. But Vietnam taught him the fragility of plans, dreams, and life itself. He survived the war but wanted more than to survive the rest of his life, he told me over our countless beers. He first worked with wood, then glass. He created his art, sold it, and made more. Found success.
We flew wing tip to wing tip, circling our hang gliders in thermals. We traveled to art shows to sell his work. For a time, I lived in a room of his beautiful modern home in Madison, WI. I met his grown kids, and he watched my own family blossom. I learned from his tolerance, and from his iconoclasm. In fifteen years, I stood as the best man in his new marriage. In a few years more, I stood by his side when his wife died in her car.
My life grew busy with the kids’ soccer games and booming business, but on three Tuesdays a month, we found time to have a beer at a local bar and talk about everything. For twenty years.
How could such friendship wither? I don’t know, but it did. Slowly. Without calling attention to its demise. We still shared a drink once in a while, but the connection grew cold. When COVID struck a year later, I realized I had not seen Greg for a year straight, then two more.
After the world thawed from the pandemic isolation, I would run into him by chance, at a restaurant, on the street, or at a festival in the city. We would greet each other with platitudes of causal acquaintances and awkwardness of lost friends. Yeah, maybe we should get together, we’d say.
All is born, blossoms, withers, then dies. The Universe enforces the cycle. It itself cannot escape the entropy. This reality is sad when we lose those we love. It is happy when we shed our past fears. This entropy is indifferent to our emotions, it just is, slowly withering everything that no longer receives the energy of attention.
Yet, with effort, sometimes a struggle, a bit of luck, always patience, and only within the limits of our short lives, we can reverse the entropy’s course, if only for a time. Think love, think relationships, and think friendships.
Alex, my partner, and I walk around the art show in Maine. We are in Bar Harbor for two months of the summer. Artists’ booths line the edge of a park. These paintings are lovely. We stop and talk to the artist. He is joyful and open. He is wearing a hang gliding hat — an embroidered wing is banking steeply.
“Do you fly hang gliders?” I ask.
“Yes, for decades. You?”
I nod, and we talk of all the flying places we have been and the same people we know. We reminisce about the heyday of the dying sport. It was always small and is smaller now.
“Do you know, Greg D,” I ask.
“Of course. He is my best friend. One of them, anyway.”
“Yes, mine too,” I lie. But maybe I don’t.
He smiles, pulls out the phone, and dials. I suspect he is calling Greg a thousand miles away.
“Greg, Mark. You know who I am talking to?” He thrust his phone at me. “There.”
“Hey, Greg. Egor.”
I hear laughter. “Of course, you would run into Mark. You are everywhere.”
We chat without the distant coldness of our latest meetings, though from a distance of a few States away. Somehow, there is a feeling of a former bond.
“Greg, I am sailing a boat from North Carolina to Key West in December. You were a sailor. Are you busy?”
“Don’t think so. I can make time.”
“Great. I will be in Wisconsin around Thanksgiving. I will pick you up.”
At the end of November, we are in Carolina Beach, NC. The boat is ready, and we sail her south. The weather is crap, and we are beating against the wind. The first night, I worry about the seventy-eight-year-old Greg; the conditions are tough. But he is the healthiest person I know.
We take shifts, cook food, and talk about the things in the news. In St. Augustine, we take a break waiting for boat parts. We run on the beach every other morning. Greg runs three miles, then walks back through a shortcut in the dunes. He is out of shape, he complains and insists that I go my planned distance. I find him reading his book back by the dinghy.
We talk. Politics, religion, human nature, relationships. We talk about people we hurt and people we let down. We speak of redemption and how there is not enough time to fix our wrongs.
We explore restaurants. Greg is a picky eater, everything must be healthful and made just so. He drives me crazy, but quietly in my head. I am more accepting with age. I envy his discipline. His diet must be a reason why the seventy-eight-year-old man can run at my pace, an amateur athlete thirty years his junior. He is steadfast in his habits but breaks the rules when we listen to live music — he has a second beer.
Days fly fast; a day before Christmas, we are five hours away from Key West. The wind is perfect, abeam, pushing us at seven knots. Sun. Warmth. Aquamarine seas.
“This is what I imagined this sail would be. It is perfect,” Greg says.
“Greg, why did we lose touch for five years?”
“I don’t know. Maybe… when you bake bread, you knead the dough, but then you cover it and let it rest for a few hours. Maybe it is like that with friendships. Good to set aside for a bit so they can rise just right.”
A great experience to share. I lost my best frie d from college yesterday and he was one of those that you could, mostly certainly, just come back together. After years. Good friends are hard to cultivate, and we must keep them, however that works!!
Your sentiments are lovely and ring true. Your writing ain’t bad either. (Loved the narration ❤️)