Do the years make relationships stronger?

It seems that a familiar name from my past thrusts itself back to the forefront of my consciousness at ever-more-frequent intervals in recent years.

The most recent stream of rekindled relationships began several years ago when I attended the 100th Anniversary celebration of my Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity at the University of Missouri.
In May of last year, only a few years after our 50th reunion of the Class of 1955 from Castle Heights Military Academy, one of my former roommates called about another Heights friend who was gravely ill in Panama City, Panama, and we quickly put together our trip to visit him. He died several weeks later.

A call from an old Army buddy from Fort Bragg, N.C., who was facing open-heart surgery within the past month prompted a flying trip to Detroit that I was more than happy to make. You don’t keep score on things like that, but he had been with my family and at my side for almost a week when I faced similar circumstances several years ago in Montana.

Just last week when I accompanied a Maryville friend of more than 20 years to Tampa for a medical procedure, I took a couple of days to reunite with an ATO and J-School friend I had seen maybe three times since we were graduated and headed our separate ways — he to an advertising job in St. Joseph and I to Carbondale, Ill., as city hall reporter for the Southern Illinoisan.

This weekend I hope to be in Omaha to take part in an induction into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. The honoree to be is the executive director of the Nebraska Press Association, who just happened to serve as the secretary of state there for 23 years before moving over to the Fourth Estate. We became friends after I joined the Montana Newspaper Association in a similar position and we attended numerous conferences and conventions together — with the Missouri Press director I’d known since 1976.

Toss in the high school and college graduations for kids of neighbors from El Dorado, Ark., and you have a retracing of friendships — and memories — from quite a few years’ worth of history.
When most of my old friends and I get together, no matter how long it has been since we last saw each other, or even spoke, it most often seems like we had been together only the day before. The conversation usually comes that easy, on the widest of ranges of topics. And I don’t believe it to be a generational thing that only “older” people engage in. I know, at least, that our children all three maintain exceptionally close ties to a handful of high school and college friends, as well as professional acquaintances they have met along the way.

As Samuel Johnson so eloquently put it so long ago, to drop friends accumulated along the various pathways of our lives “is not wise,” by any stretch of the imagination.

Without wanting to seem overly self-centered in the overall scheme of events, I know my most recent encounters with long-time friends were nourishing to me and my mental well being — and I have every reason to believe they were also meaningful to the others as well.

I certainly know that when I was floundering around, almost three years ago now, trying to settle on a place to light, knowing that I would have at least a few “old buddies” I could count on to make me feel at home meant a lot to me. And, sure enough, after having seen most of them maybe only once or twice in the past 12 years, we, for the most part, picked up right where we had left off.

I just hope that a result of this age of electronics will not be to diminish those kinds of relationships as the years slip by, and they will slip by. During last Sunday’s graduation for Maryville High School, I am willing to wager that there were dozens of promises to “stay in touch.” I am also willing to wager that the vast majority of those promises will evaporate, sooner rather than later. And, as Mr. Johnson said so succinctly, therein lies one of our most serious flaws.

I know I can say from my personal experience that keeping in touch with as many old friends as possible has been satisfying to me — in so many ways.

As a matter of fact, I had an e-mail while I was visiting my ol’ ATO buddy in Florida that got my juices to flowing. It was from my CHMA roommate — he of the Panama adventure — putting together a golf outing before our 55th reunion next October.

Sounds like a winner to me, even if there’s not a guy in the crowd who’ll come close to shooting his age, not for 18 holes anyway.