The Permanent Value of Temporary Friendships

relationships don't need to last forever to be meaningful

Last summer, I wrote a blog post for a contest that it didn’t win. But I think it’s a good post, so I’m sharing it today with all of you. In keeping with the general conceit of this newsletter, in which I blather on and eventually rate a song, let’s say that today’s song is this version of “Loch Lomond” and that I give it five out of five stars. Enjoy.

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In middle school, I was friends with a kid named Tim who then moved away to New Jersey. We played soccer at his going away party. (I’m terrible at soccer.) Years later, as I milled around my dorm on the first day of freshman year, meeting all the other weirdos who had been parked in honors housing, I ran into Tim. Tim! From middle school! We played Halo and talked about math and tried to flirt with girls. (As with soccer, Tim was better at all these things than I was.) A couple of weeks into school, Tim told me that he was joining the Men’s Glee Club and that I should join him because he knew I loved to sing. But, unlike Tim, I was a moody, emo shit, and so even though I had been the president of my high school choir, I passed on the offer because I wanted to focus my musical energies on writing dark, intense emo songs.

Three years later, my dark, intense emo band had run its course and I found myself at a personal crossroads. I was heading into my senior year, and not only had my band—into which I had poured all my energies, musical or otherwise—disbanded, but my long-term girlfriend had dumped me. My closest connections were now all exes: one ex-girlfriend and four ex-bandmates. A natural introvert and loner, I was now very, very alone. So alone that even I knew I needed someone or something to grab onto.

Spurred by a pitiful conversation with that ex-girlfriend, I went to an extracurricular fair and walked past all the booths hosted by fencing clubs and mathletes and Students For or Against Whatever. Since there was no Wayward Emo Club, I signed up for an audition with an a cappella group. As I left the audition, I got stopped by some guys sitting at a table in the hall. They tried to convince me that I should try out for the Glee Club, too. I was already there, they said, so why not.

Having passed the sight-reading test, I was led to a small classroom for what, I would discover, amounted to a personality test. In the room, seven guys sat around a long table, three on each side and one at the head. I stepped to the open end, but there was no chair—not at the table, not anywhere in the room—so I took a knee, leaned my elbows on the table, and took in my interviewers. And, naturally, there was Tim.

“You didn’t want to join when we were freshmen,” he says in my memory of the moment. “So what makes you want to join now?” And then I explain about my band ending and the need for music in my life and I leave out the part about being dumped because, Tim aside, I don’t know these guys. They smile and nod knowingly and then one of the guys on the left side of the table tells one of the guys on the right side that he could never be the singer of a rock band because he has the voice of a fairy, and Fairy Voice shoots back that, actually, it’s Left Guy that could never be the singer of a rock band because singers have to sing actual melodies, not vocalized bass lines, and I just smile quietly as I watch the playful volley unfold.

“Tell us about a recurring dream you have,” says the guy at the head of the table. It’s a strange question and one I’ve obviously not prepared for. In truth, I don’t have any recurring dreams, but it’s clear that these guys don’t actually care about the activities of my sleeping mind; they want to evaluate my ability to bullshit and hang, and so I put on my storyteller cap and I say, “I have this dream where I step out onto the ice to play hockey, but there’s no one in the crowd, and no one else comes out onto the ice. It’s just me, skating and skating and skating.” But I can tell they need more, so, “And the ice is pink.”

“What do you think that means?”

“Probably that I have abandonment issues.”

They laugh. The next day, they let me know that I got in. (Didn’t make the a cappella group, if you’re keeping tabs.)

But so here’s the thing. Even then, even after the mock interview and even knowing that I needed an activity, a reason to leave my apartment outside of class and my shitty maintenance job, I still didn’t want to join the Club. It was an obligation, a responsibility, and saying glee club just felt so unbelievably nerdy. But, most importantly, I was afraid. I was afraid that I wouldn’t enjoy this new obligation, sure, but I was also afraid that the Club would just be one more place where I was an outsider. For most of my life, those fears would have been enough. I would have written a nice email saying “thanks but no thanks” and stayed on my couch playing Xbox and singing along to albums that I loved but could not replicate. But, to my own surprise, I didn’t do that. I signed up. I joined the Club. And, for no reason that I could see, they welcomed me like a brother.

Sunday night rehearsals were dry affairs, but on Thursdays we’d finish up and walk across campus to Cottage Inn where we had a standing reservation for a room in the basement, and we’d eat pizza and drink frosty mugs of beer and play drinking games and loudly sing drinking songs. (The University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club is ancient and enamored with its own rich history; it has a lengthy catalog of original songs, authored for it by members, directors, and commissioned artists. The hallowed grounds of Ann Arbor’s campus are a central, mythical figure in that cumulative text—old-timey types really knew how to wax nostalgic about drunkenly stumbling through the quad with their bros. Lesser attention was paid to heading over to neighboring Ypsilanti to pick up girls, but not no attention. For all that, the core focus of most of these nigh-hundred-year-old drinking songs is fraternal camaraderie.) And then, after a couple of hours, we’d head outside and sing a farewell song and splinter off into small groups of five or six and always, every week, someone would invite me to go with them, and more often than not, to my own surprise, I did, and we’d close out the campus bars while talking about sports and music and trying and failing to pick up girls.

We traveled to D.C. where we sang beneath gargoyles and Darth Vader, and then we toured Spain where we performed in ancient cathedrals and drank in dingy bars until we fell down in the street (or, in one guy’s case, down the foot of a mountain—he’s fine). And we were as close as friends could be, helping each other through breakups and exams and grad school applications and, ever and anon, the finding of new girlfriends and boyfriends.

Before I was in Club, I thought that the only meaningful friendships were lifelong ones, in which there were no gaps, no lost time, no unknowns, mysteries, or end dates. And those types of friendship are important. (I’m fortunate enough to have a few of them and I wouldn’t give them up for anything.) But they’re not the only type of meaningful friendship.

I think we sometimes conflate knowing someone with knowing about someone. My Club friends didn’t necessarily know all about me; we hadn’t spent decades experiencing life together, hadn’t spent endless time recounting each and every one of our stories. But they knew me. They saw whatever kindness or humor or wit I bring to the world because I did not hide those things from them, and I did not hide those things from them because they did not hide them from me. There was trust there, faith almost, that we were each of us worthy of honesty and authenticity without requiring proofs.

That’s a powerful thing, that blind trust. So powerful that it’s one of the fundamental underpinnings of support groups and religions and, uh, cults. Blind trust can be abused. But it doesn’t have to be. It can allow us to connect and to grow without having to fight through all the armor that we wear to protect ourselves most of the time. Though I only spent a year with them, my Club friendships created lasting change in my life. That year and those friendships gave me a sense of confidence—confidence that I am deserving of generosity and kindness, confidence that my value as a person does not require justification or preamble—that continues to shape my life.

It's been a decade and a half since I graduated and, in the years since, my time with fellow Clubbers has dwindled down to nothing. I haven’t connected with Tim in an age, and it’s been four or five years since I last saw another Clubber and we were able to grab one more frosty mug together. But I still think of those guys, not only Tim, but also Eagle, Danny, A-Train, and all the others, as friends. Whether that’s past or present tense is not terribly important. The impact has been made, the laughter shared, the lives enriched. And that’s what friendship is about, right, enriching one another’s lives? That enrichment doesn’t have to stop when we lose touch.

I’ve been writing on the internet for more than 15 years and, with few exceptions, I prefer to publish independently through my blogs or newsletters, retaining ownership and control of my work. But I dropped what I was doing to write and submit this piece to Experimental History, a newsletter I’d not previously read. The call for submissions had been forwarded to me by the aforementioned Eagle, though we hadn’t spoken in several years. I trust him still, my friend.