Katherine Dalton, On Friendship

Well, let us snap our cellphones shut and use the word correctly: even so, there are friends and there are friends. The first sort includes those people we enjoy seeing maybe often, maybe not, learn something from, swap stories with, leave the children with, borrow books from, or work with compatibly. We reach out to them (and they to us) feeling various degrees of affection and need. Most of us require an extended social network to keep us mentally and morally awake, and for a laugh, too, and if these friends are people we can weave in and out of our lives without heartbreak, they are nonetheless dear. They respond, they amuse, and they sometimes shelter us in a way that shows as clear as paint that the world is full of goodness and not just evil. Nor do they generally require an enormous amount of time. A man who cannot keep friendships like these in good repair isn’t trying.

But the friends who are our best and closest friends are another matter entirely. They are rare, and irreplaceable, and to those of us temperamentally inclined to look at things a certain way, they seem to be one of the many excesses of a Creation that is so overflowing with good things that there is a great deal of undeserved extra. We have our families, who are stuck with us; how fortunate we are also to have our intimate friends, who are not.

Finding friends like these seems to be a matter of grace or luck, though keeping them requires time and effort, tact and finally love. Beyond fourth grade there is no instant best-friending; real friendship needs a patina. It has to be proven in order to be. It needs presence, too; communion is too subtle a matter to establish itself well long-distance. You can maintain friendships across the country, but you can’t really grow them; not without visits in between. (At least I can’t. The one exception I’d make is for letters, since a written letter can be almost as expressive as a face.) It’s very hard to be there for someone long-distance, either; in times of crisis there is no substitution for the laying on of hands. Outside of the necessity of your kids knowing their grandparents, keeping an old friend at hand is the strongest argument I know for everybody to stop moving already.