Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
My daughter Staci, then a teenager, commented after summer visits from my college friends Gino Ninnie and later Andy Herbst, “Wow, Dad, you sure have cool friends.”
I’ll admit, yes, I do.
Can you imagine life without friends?
I’ve read about and remember from my adolescent psychology classes at UW an aberrant behavior called “Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (NPD) One of the signs of someone with NPD is few, or no friends at all. That along with believing they are superior to everyone else, lack empathy and are experts at gaslighting are other indicators. These people never take responsibility for their actions, create chaos then claim they’re the victim.
It’s no surprise that when the main elements of your personality are a lack of empathy, constant uncontrolled lying, and a superior attitude toward those around you, you’d have no friends.
Who would want to be around you?
Someone with NPD could easily be called the worst person you have ever met.
Thankfully, these psychos are few and far between, aside from corporate board rooms and Washington, D.C. that is.
Friends are the opposite. They’re someone you can confide in, someone you can depend on, and someone who can count on you for the same support.
I’ve been blessed with a lot of friends in my life. Some were fellow travelers, people I went to school with, grew up with, worked with or found a common interest with. I think that’s how most of us form friendships. With others, there was a deeper connection.
I think of my friend Tad and all the adventures we’ve had. From working in sketchy, dangerous settings to touring foreign countries. Tad has been there every step of the way. In the process, his family and mine have become joined. I never had a brother by birth, but I’ve got one by friendship with Tad.
Raising our kids together, building our homes, giving each other grief just for the fun of it and growing old together. They’ve all been important steps in our lives.
One afternoon as we were building a garage addition to my parents’ home, my dad was watching us. We couldn’t work without insulting each other, that’s just what guys do on the job.
“You guys do nothing but bad mouth each other, but when one of you needs a tool, the other one hands it to him without asking,” My Dad said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
We hadn’t noticed before he said that but he was right. I’d just set a rafter and was about to trim the tail when a handsaw popped up at eye level. Tad knew I needed it and passed it to me without asking.
That’s a connection.
Sometimes, you meet friends in unlikely settings. At a track meet a long time ago, I heard a booming voice coming from the far side of the track. There was a guy with a blue jacket on, with long braids flowing in the wind as he sprinted along the inside of the curve at a group of Wyoming Indian middle-distance runners.
It was my now lifelong friend Chico. The man can coach, and coach boys and girls from 10-years old to state champion seniors. But here’s a little secret, he’s an even better teacher. As the technology director at Wyoming Indian I’d try to have coffee with Chico before school each day and learn what he was teaching that afternoon in his American History classes.
I couldn’t do it every day since I had a lot of work to do, but if the topic was intriguing, I’d make an excuse to work on something in his room just to listen to him work with those high school kids. It was amazing, a privilege to watch a master at work. I often tell people he could impart more knowledge to youngsters drawing in the dirt with a stick than all the high-priced, audiovisual technology in the world.
Most of all, I’m proud to call him my friend.
The magic with true friends is that they don’t always agree, Chico and I have had great conversations where we don’t agree on a topic, but we’ve listened to and respected each other’s opinions. That’s the mark of a friend.
At a faculty meeting long ago my late friend Harold Bailey and I were at odds on some mundane issue. It was an argument that brought a few raised eyebrows from the gals on staff. After the meeting was over, a couple of them came up sheepishly and asked why Harold and I were fighting. I told them, and I suspected he did as well, that we weren’t fighting, we were just disagreeing. We did that often, but most people didn’t see it since it was on the bus, in the coach’s office, on the field, or on a commute to work.
There is a lesson for modern America, you can disagree and remain friends. We don’t all have to jump in the bunker and throw grenades at each other over some trivial dispute.
It seems that most of my friends share a common connection through teaching or coaching.
Contrary to what “Joe Fan” thinks up there in the stands, the two coaches trying to beat each other’s team are often great friends. It was the case in my generation, and I see it today with the younger coaches and the camaraderie they share.
Why not? They put up with the same privileged attitudes, the same overbearing parents, and the same lack of support from their administrators while sharing the same passion for a sport. Common interests build friendships.
Friends can be family as well. My late brother-in-law, really my other brother, was a fabulous friend. Matt and I disagreed politically on a lot of things, but that didn’t stop us from giving each other the business a little bit along the way. It was just part of the fun. I miss Matt, Harold, Chuck Wells, Harold Mulholland and my recently departed friend, David Trembly.
If you live long enough, you will eventually begin to lose friends, fellow travelers and acquaintances who have made differences in your life, that’s just the nature of our mortal existence. We don’t like it, but there’s nothing we can do about it aside from keeping their memories alive and smiling once in a while when you encounter a situation and wonder what they’d have done about it.
You won’t find a single one of my friends with the remotest trace of NPD. Odds are none of your friends have that disorder either. It’s just not the nature of friendship.
A parting thought, and one I’ve shared with many of my friends.
If you’re in trouble with the law, a friend will hide you, a great friend will help you hide a body.
Here’s to friendship.