This morning I am thinking about friendship. About making friends, and losing friends. About keeping friends.

I’ve said for years to my students that I don’t have any close friends except for my wife, who is my best friend; but that’s an exaggeration for effect. I say it because I’m trying to make them understand that I’m an introvert, that therefore I am most comfortable without a lot of people around; it usually comes out of conversations about my general lack of social life, because I don’t go to parties and I don’t go out with my friends very often. I also say things like this when they tell me that they NEED their friends, that they HAVE to socialize, usually in the middle of a lesson, or when they are talking about their class schedule for the next year and they say they can only take classes with their friends in them.

I say it to be a curmudgeon. It’s a lie; I do have friends.

I think I do. I mean, of course I do. Right?

This morning I am wondering what makes a friend.

If it is affection: having positive feelings towards someone, a desire to interact with them and a general happiness when you do, then I have lots of friends. There are many people I have warm, kind feelings towards, and even more who I enjoy interacting with, even if there isn’t a strong underlying connection. Presumably that means there can be friendships that are on-again off-again, as there are people — MANY people — whom I can stand for a short time. P.E. teachers, for instance. And math people. I like sitting next to the Coach in meetings so long as we don’t have to talk about football.

But does that make sense? Do you like your friends in fifteen-minute intervals? Can you dislike or be indifferent to your friends? I don’t think so. I don’t really need to define and delineate friendship in a scientific sense, but I do think your friends have to be your friends all the time, unless one of you is being an asshole, and then you can get past that and forgive and forget and be friends again. But if someone is only your friend for the length of the bus ride, I don’t know that I’d call that a friendship.

So there is something of an underlying connection that is needed, a stronger tie than just momentary affection. But where does that come from? Do you need to have things in common?

Almost all of my friends are teachers. Because I really don’t socialize very much, and never have, so I don’t make a lot of friends outside of work. But most teachers and I differ pretty strongly on a lot of matters to do with our work. I think grades don’t matter, and I don’t believe in disciplining students for rule infractions (Cheating, yes; rudeness or bullying, HELL yes — but dress code? Meh.), and I have some deep disagreements with the entire system of education which they generally do not; maybe the best way to sum it up is that most teachers were A+ students, and I most emphatically was not. I have only known a few teachers who were artists in the way that I am, and most of them are parents, where I most emphatically am not. None of them have my taste in music, really. Many of them are religious and though we agree on most political matters, there are certainly a few who do not, and none of them think about politics as much as I do. They think my pirate obsession is cute.

So we have some things in common, but not everything. I’m not discounting either of these qualities of friendship, because they are certainly true: the people who I would consider my friends do have a lot in common with me, and we do share affection for longer periods of time than the length of one meeting.

Shared experiences, then. There, I have much stronger ties to my friends. Because teachers, man: we’ve seen some shit. We’ve been through some shit. We’ve all had THAT ONE CLASS, and THAT ONE KID, and THAT ONE PARENT, and THAT ONE MEETING. We’ve all had days where we didn’t know what we were teaching, and days when the grand design came together into a moment of crystal-perfect education. We’ve all hated our job and loved our job, and none of us get paid enough for it.

But the P.E. teachers and I have those experiences in common, too. And even more shocking, most administrators have them, too. No, I can’t even think about that. Not them.

It’s starting to seem like there are layers, here. Affection that lasts, and traits/ideas in common, and shared experiences. That makes sense. It helps to explain some of my more unusual friendships, with people who are quite far from me in age, who have very different lives or personalities, and yet sometimes we get along famously, and the friendships are quite close.

What about when I move away?

I’ve moved a lot; I left Massachusetts and the East Coast when I graduated high school, and went to college in Santa Cruz, California; I started teaching in Escondido, California, and then I moved to St. Helens, Oregon, and then to Tucson, Arizona. I still have friends from all of those places — but in every case, I’ve never been back. My friends from St. Helens I haven’t seen in five years, the ones in Escondido I haven’t seen in fifteen years; the ones from Massachusetts it’s going on three decades. Thanks to the interwebs we can still be in touch, and so there can be new conversations and connections, new shared experiences — of a sort. But it seems like less of a friendship.

I don’t like saying that. I don’t mean to denigrate my friendships. I also, I confess, don’t really want to take a grand tour and visit everyone I have known; the introvert in me is wailing and crawling into a hole as I write these words, as I contemplate that trip. But it feels different when you can’t see someone face to face any more. Surely if shared experience brings us closer together, disparate experience does something to move us apart.

I’m scared of that. Because at some point, I’m going to move again, to be nearer to aging family, if for no other reason. And I don’t want to lose my friends I have now any more than I want to have lost my friends from before. But I don’t know how to keep them close if I am far away.

Maybe I should just stick to dogs.