Someone in Buzzy’s Country Store told me that his best friend had recently died and that he was very upset about it. He was close to my late 60’s age, so I made some commiserating comment to him about being at that point in life where our friends start passing away and how sad it is.
He replied that he was upset not only that the friend had passed but more so he was upset that he did not know that his friend had been sick and had been on his death bed for several months. He said he was most upset with and pissed off at his friend’s daughter for not having let him know how bad off his friend really was.
I commiserated some more with him about how different folks deal differently with bad news things like sickness and death. I even made a comment defending the daughter that those “Dad is dying” phone calls are tough ones to execute.
My Buzzy friend didn’t really get my point(s) and continued to talk more about how the daughter was irresponsible, selfish etc.. He knocked her around some more by noting that the least she could have done was to have let him know that his best friend was down for the count.
Just to get him off the subject, I simply said that I was sorry to hear about his best friend passing away.
However, what I really wanted to say to him was “If this was such a close friend of yours, why weren’t you more in touch with him and would have known first hand what was up (or down in this case) with him?” There again I backed off and defaulted to my “different folks deal differently” point of view. As my friend got another beer, I told him that it was on me in memory of his friend. He thanked me and we began to talk about how hot it is and how we really do need some rain.
All of which brings me to something I hear people repeat often about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer. I regard that as one of the dumbest sayings ever about friendship. Whomever came up with that evidently did not have a lot of friends for the simple reason that if you really are keeping your friends close to you, then you don’t have any time on your hands to mess with your enemies. My approach with so called enemies is that I don’t want to have anything to do with them, much, much less keep them close to me.
Caught Carole’s performance at A Capitol Fourth the other night and again realized just how great she is. Here then is perhaps the best song ever about having and being a good friend.
