An Old Friend

This week I had lunch with an old friend from high school. Ben now lives in San Francisco, where he has lived since he left Norman with my best friend after their first year of college. They didn't stay together, but both stayed in San Francisco. After having lunch with him this week, I did some mental calculation and realized that I have not seen him in 21 years.

Ben was always super bright. Actually, I had a LOT of friends in high school who were scary intelligent (it goes without saying I was not one of them... just a hanger on. Seriously, these people are SMART, and have gone on to fascinating, brain-twisting and lucrative jobs in the Real World). Ben was a computer geek from elementary school, and always had this dry, peculiar sense of humor. He and another friend cajoled the high school communications teacher to give them access to the High School tv studio after hours and they produced this very quirky late night show, the name of which I have completely forgotten. They were just having fun with the camera, when they realized after awhile that they had developed this sort of cult following. Ben's whole life has been sort of like that. Just sort of putzing along from one project to the next, doing what he feels like doing or what grabs his attention, and somehow making a success of it.

Seeing him again was a little like looking into a very weird mirror. He looks exactly the same. Only older. Not in the "oh my god, you look old!" way, but in the same way I'm sure I look exactly the same, only older. Because I'm older, he doesn't really look older to me, if you know what I mean. He looks exactly like I would have expected him to look. His mannerisms are the same. His sense of humor is the same. I'm sure if I had the chance to spend any time with him, he would get on my nerves in exactly the same way he did when we were part of a group of best friends in high school. It was oddly comforting. Oddly disconcerting.

It made me nostalgic for those high school days when friends were so easy to come by, and so easily kept. There are very few friends I have made since that time that I think I will feel so easy with after a 20-year separation in the future (of course, who knows if I'll even remember them in 20 years? At the rate my memory is going, it's a bit doubtful). But those few friends I have retained from that time have a sort of unassailable agelessness to them. (You know who you are!) And it is comforting to return to them, even after a gap of months or years, and know that they know me. My mannerisms, my quirks and interests and sense of humor were imprinted on them when we were kids and I didn't have any reasons to protect myself or pretend to be something else or feel self-conscious. Okay, teenagers are sickeningly self-conscious. But not in the really false-front way we are as adults. When you're a teenager, no matter how much of a front you put on, your real self just spills out all over. Partly because you don't even know who it is yourself. Now, after years of experience, we know what parts of ourselves we had best keep quiet in polite company, and we're much better at pretending.

My point, if I had one, is that seeing Ben was like stepping into an old sneaker. Just a little stiff at first from disuse, but then just as comfy as before. It's nice to know people like that.