Light Stalking

Before We Needed to Agree Remembering the friends who knew us before we had so many opinions about everything. For some strange reason I can’t quite put my finger on, I was thinking about my adolescent friends today. Those beautiful idiots the universe dropped into my life before any of us had the slightest clue who we were or where we were going. Friends I didn’t interview, research, or run through an ideological background check. We just found each other. And for that small, magnificent accident, I will always be grateful. We didn’t talk much about politics or religion. I’m sure we had opinions, mostly borrowed from our parents and delivered with the confidence of people who hadn’t paid an electric bill. But nobody had to pass a test to hang around. We weren’t examining each other’s vocabulary for evidence of membership in the wrong tribe. Mostly, we wanted to know who was coming over and whether anybody had any weed. Our concerns were considerably more urgent. Girls. Sex. The possibility of sex. The increasingly convincing evidence that everybody else was having sex and we weren’t. We were kids with a seemingly endless supply of erections and absolutely no idea what to do with our lives—or, frankly, our hands. Rock ’n’ roll. Blues. Sports. Television. School, when absolutely necessary. Summer breezes through an open car window. Rebellion against The Man, although our understanding of The Man was broad enough to include a vice principal who wouldn’t let us wear our hair the way we wanted. We were children of the late sixties and early seventies, and we were damn proud of it. We had music our parents didn’t understand and ambitions we couldn’t explain. We were going to become something. Exactly what remained a little fuzzy. Successful? Famous? Free? At the very least, we hoped to become people who didn’t need to ask permission to borrow the car. And we belonged to each other in that easy, unexamined way young people sometimes do. A friend was somebody you wanted beside you while nothing much happened. Somebody who could make an otherwise forgettable afternoon worth remembering fifty years later. We didn’t know we were building memories. We were just trying to find something to do before somebody’s mother called us home. Fast-forward five decades, and I sometimes wonder what the hell happened to us. Somewhere along the way, our opinions got heavier. We acquired convictions, disappointments, mortgages, divorces, cable news, and the ability to ruin a perfectly decent morning before getting out of bed. We learned to explain ourselves. Then we got very good at explaining what was wrong with everybody else. Now, what separates us can seem more important than everything that once brought us together. A political post appears, and suddenly I’m looking at an old friend through narrowed eyes. The same person who once made me laugh until I couldn’t breathe becomes somebody whose judgment I question. I can feel an entire history getting crowded out by whatever he shared on Facebook that morning. And before I get too sentimental or self-righteous, let me admit that I participate in this shit. I have strong opinions. You may have noticed. I read something and make assumptions about the person who posted it. Sometimes I’m right. Sometimes I’m probably filling in a whole human being with information that wouldn’t fill a paragraph. Either way, the distance grows. I don’t think the answer is pretending our differences don’t matter. Some matter enormously. What we believe can affect how other people get to live, and an old friendship doesn’t make cruelty easier to swallow. I’m also aware that our carefree adolescence wasn’t carefree for everybody. There were things we didn’t discuss because we didn’t understand them, or because they weren’t happening to us. Still, I miss the curiosity we had about one another before we became so certain. I miss being able to sit with somebody without anticipating an argument. I miss the ridiculous laugh, the shared song, the unfinished story that somebody else could finish. There are people who remember versions of me that no longer exist anywhere else. I hate to think how casually we can lose that. Maybe that’s why those friends wandered into my head today. I wanted, for a moment, to be in their company again, before we knew so much. Before every conversation carried the possibility of becoming a referendum on who deserved our respect. I wanted to ask how they were doing and actually listen. To hear that laugh again. To remember that we once had a whole afternoon ahead of us, a song on the radio, and absolutely no fucking idea what came next. Jack.