"Friendships - Old and New"

                                                                     Sydney M. Williams

Essay from Essex

“Friendships – Old and New”

December 18, 2021

 

“’Friendship,’ said Christopher Robin, ‘is a very comforting thing to have.’”

                                                                                                                                Winnie the Pooh, 1926

             A.A. Milne (1882-1956)

 

An unexpected benefit of writing essays has been old friends retained and new friends made. With an e-mail list that approaches two thousand, included are friends who go back to boarding school days, a few from college, and from my first job on Wall Street with Merrill Lynch in 1967, to my last at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., from which I retired in 2015. While not everyone agrees with my political opinions, they tolerate my right to express them. Some on the list are friends of friends and even friends of those friends. Many I have never met but hearing from them is pleasurable, as they are provocative and energizing. In a letter to Lidian Jackson Emerson, wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and the longitudes.” In my case, I don’t think of latitudes and longitudes; what I do think is that friends make the world smaller and more intimate – a happier and better place.

 

Some of my more personal Essays from Essex are based on nostalgia – that time cleanses memory of past unpleasantness. Quoting studies by Professor Clay Routledge, a psychologist at North Dakota State University, Elizabeth Bernstein wrote in the November 17, 2021 issue of The Wall Street Journal: “Nostalgia increases positive mood, self-esteem and self-confidence…It makes us feel more socially connected and optimistic. It helps us feel that life has more meaning.” Recently, I attended a lunch with a few alumni from Williston Academy, three of whom were 1959 classmates. While our genetic determinants are decided at conception, our character is molded over time, especially in our early years, from families, friends and school. So, it is unsurprising that we prize returning to those days when our identity was being formed. Each of us is unique, but we share certain of life’s experiences, like teachers, coaches, bosses and even drill sergeants. A shared past allows us to recollect, companionably, of former times. 

 

Friendship is a non-obligatory, reciprocated relationship between two people who share common interests. Most of us have friends, orbiting different spheres. For example, I have school friends, work friends, friends with whom I skied, friends my wife and I see in Florida, or on the New Jersey shore where we go in August. My wife and I have friends at Essex Meadows, where we now live. I have friends with whom I enjoy ROMEO (retired old men eating out) lunches, and friends from volunteering at local organizations. Friendships outlast separation. In his collection of essays Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “I was going to say, when I was interrupted…” The interruption to which he referred had occurred twenty-five years earlier. That quote would come to mind during my first evening in Vail with skiing friends, when the conversation would pick up just where it had left off a year earlier. 

 

“To be without friends is a serious form of poverty,” speaks Victor Moore as Aloysius T. McKeever in Roy Del Ruth’s 1947 comedy, It Happened on Fifth Avenue. He is right, and I am fortunate to have all of you as friends, as well as a wife who is my best friend – and has been for almost sixty years.

 

Thank you for your friendship, and I wish you the best for the Holidays and for all of the New Year.