The TaxPoodle

I have lunch plans today. I’ll be meeting a friend, and his husband, at Billy Reed’s, a famous Palm Springs eatery not a quarter mile from my residence; I wrote about Billy Reed’s last December on the occasion of their 50th anniversary. It is one of four restaurants in my neighborhood close enough I can get to on my powerchair, five if you count the Del Taco on Racquet Club. Six if you count the Carl’s Jr. across the street from that. But I have a reputation to maintain, so we’ll leave off the list any “restaurant” where you can be handed your meal in a bag by a teenager wearing a headset while you sit in your car idling.

Now this friend is more of an acquaintance. One I’ve known for 43 years. But not consecutively. What I mean by that is I met him in 1983, never spoke or even thought of him for 40 years, and then met up with him last year in a classic example of all-gay-guys-eventually-move-to-or-visit-Palm-Springs-and-when-they-realize-I-live-here-reach-out-and-get-in-touch. His husband has had some recent health issues, and I am like the High Priest of health issues, so that’s bound to come up. Fine. But they both like country music and admit this publicly by going line dancing without an ounce of shame. And one wears a cowboy hat, like all the time, non-ironically.

Makes you stop and wonder what the nature of friendship is. I think, when we are kids, it’s proximity: your friends are neighbors, maybe classmates. There’s the all important what your dad does, because as a kid what you do is “ride bikes.” My dad designed missile silos for the US defense posture during the Cold War, my friend Gene’s dad was a doctor, and Mike H.’s dad owned a catering company. We came from dramatically different households, but we were friends because we were in the same class at Mark Keppel Elementary, and we all lived within bike-riding distance of each other in the northwest corner of Glendale, California.

As you move into and through adulthood, the nature of friendship changes. It becomes more about what you have in common with someone – this might be career, politics, religion, sports, or music, to name but a few. Being gay, and an almost 30-year survivor of HIV, I have had many friendships based on those things alone.

When you enter your senior years, it seems to be about longevity. Now I have to be careful here, because I call people friends today with whom I am merely “friendly.” And that includes a lot of people who are more accurately referred to as acquaintances. But friends? I’d reserve that appellation for only four people in my life: a guy I went to high school with (from the famous Glendale to La Cañada carpool), a guy I used to work with (and yelled “control your people” at when one of his employees took my parking spot), a guy I used to drink with at a gay bar I spent way too much time and money in, and a classmate of mine from the seminary who is now a Catholic priest. It’s an odd group to be sure, and I’d never put them all in the same room together.

The individuals in this group could not be more different from one another. Can you imagine the priest bellying up to the bar (even though he likes a cold beer and/or a nice single malt scotch) with me and my old drinking buddy as some half-naked dancer wiggles his pelvis on a gogo box and inebriated middle-aged homosexuals slide dollar bills into his g-string? Ahem… that’s the dancer’s g-string, not the priest’s.

With one exception, all the members of this group live far away. So proximity and shared interest(s) don’t account for these friendships. Yet they exist and have for many years. Which is why I concluded time was the secret sauce. And they’re still going strong today, showing no signs of deteriorating – and growing stronger.

I did some cursory research on what friendship is, and got some pretty obvious answers. Here are a few of them, paraphrased:

• friendship gives people comfort during difficult times, joy during happy moments, and support when challenges seem impossible to overcome
• unlike family relationships, friendships are often chosen freely, which makes them special and meaningful
• one of the greatest qualities of friendship is trust – friends share secrets, dreams, and fears with each other because they feel safe and understood
• an important aspect of friendship is companionship – life becomes more enjoyable when experiences are shared with others

Those are all important ingredients, and they are all present to a greater or lesser degree in my little ragtag group of friends. But some of those things characterize the relationship I have with acquaintances. So what sets friends apart?

You might well ask why does it matter. And I’m going to give you a particularly nerdy, poodlian answer, one you should probably expect from me given how well we know each other – first principles. For Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor and probably greatest exponent of Greek Stoic doctrine, philosophy emphasizes understanding the true nature of things and our relationship to the whole; he instructs us to examine the essence of each situation and recognize what it is in and of itself:

This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part.

Meditations Book II, Verse 9

And here you thought philosophy had nothing of value to offer us in the modern world but David Hume’s dry treatises on the is/ought problem outlining differences between descriptive statements and prescriptive statements, or German nihilism and French existentialism! And don’t forget the healthy dose of poodlism you get in the posts on this website thoughtful reader.

As we get older (and wiser?) proximity and interests play their part. And longevity becomes possible. Gotta be around for a while for a friendship to last awhile – thanks Captain Obvious… you get that from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time? I don’t think any of them are mutually exclusive. I guess my point is that we shouldn’t toss the term friend around cavalierly. We have “friends” on Facebook… well, I don’t, because I did a social media detox back in 2013 and haven’t touched the stuff since. People swipe left or right on their dating apps reducing an entire person to a photo.  At least Twitter, now known as Elon Musk’s X, is honest and calls the group of people you’ve amassed your “followers,” but that makes you sound like a cult leader.

And, frankly, I think I deserve a medal or some other kind of recognition for not allowing this post to devolve into the whole Reason, Season, or Lifetime sentiment.