volante
Been talking with Aaron more lately. I’m ashamed to say I’ve let our friendship languish over the years, shades of what happened when I was in college during his final year of high school and we didn’t see each other much, except that this time the distance is much greater and our respective activity levels are much higher. But while it may be more difficult for us to casually get together and play tennis and shoot the breeze like we used to, there are definitely many means of communication I can avail myself of, ones that I haven’t used, sadly.
But lately our friendship has been picking up a bit. He’s decided to get back into tinkering with cars, which naturally opens up a huge common ground for us to talk about. A couple of months ago, he bought a 2nd-generation RX-7 (a blue example of the type was his first car), fixed it up and flipped it, and subsequently purchased his dream car: a 3rd-generation RX-7.
While it’s not necessarily my dream car, it’s certainly in the top five, and it’s a car he and I have lusted after for years. He got a good deal on the car he bought, but it was in particularly poor condition, so he’s got his work cut out for him in terms of restoring it. It definitely gives us something to talk about, though. And of course, it’s not that we couldn’t (or shouldn’t) talk about other, more “weighty” things, but having a conversational point-of-entry definitely greases the wheels, so to speak.
I’ve been trying to write a bit more lately, too. Any time I find myself in the position of not having written consistently for a while and trying to pick back up, I inevitably ponder the “scope” of my journal, how long it’s lasted, the memories it contains, and so on. And between thinking about that and musings on the “resumption” of my friendship with Aaron, there’s been a convergence of sorts between the areas. That is to say, my journal does contain a wealth of memory; however, it only goes back so far, to December 2000, and there are many gaps and fits and starts. Friends like Aaron, who have known me for ages, “contain” memories of their own, and provide a link to my past just as strong as, and that reaches farther back than my journal does. It’s almost like the act of having friends fleshes us out an individuals, connects us with our past and illuminates our present through all those “remember whens” we share when we converse. There are so many details he recalls that I’ve forgotten, or never noticed about events we both witnessed, and the same is true of me for him.
Of course, friendship accomplishes many things besides just allowing us to reminisce. But for me, the recent ruminations do provide a sort of “grounding” for the idea of having “history” with someone. It’s not such an ethereal concept any more, and I realize its importance in light of my need to be tethered in time. There are few things more unsettling to me than the thought of being “weightless in time,” of losing my bearings with respect to my past (good and bad events alike), of falling off the slope I’ve climbed so far, through my 32 years of life. So among a myriad of other ways, I’m tremendously grateful for friendship in that.