Rough Stone Rolling

I’ve been corresponding this past week with my best friend, volleying emails back and forth, planning a road trip this April. His name is Steve. I call him Bear.

I don’t have a lot of friends. Let me clarify: I have “friends” wherever I go– people I profess to be friends and who call me friend. We see each other out of circumstance; work, church, neighborhood. Sometimes we’ll even go out and do something together, maybe even a camping trip. I just don’t have many friendships that I’ve taken with me over the years. Those who I do have I can count on one hand, and even some of those I’m lucky to make contact with once a year. Exceptions would be those friends our family have made whom we see a few times a year. We love them dearly, myself included– the wives conspire shopping trips and dinner menus, the kids go nuts and are now starting to experience innocent crushes on each other, and the men “catch up”– however, as beloved as they are, I don’t count them as my friends, the ones I’ve cultivated myself. I’m not particularly lonely– you know, like calling people on QVC and asking about products just to be in a conversation– but it bugs me that I have such a short roster to take with me into the next life. Joseph Smith had said, “If my life is of no value to my friends, it is of no value to me.” I wonder what I’d fetch on eBay.

Bear is the top of the chosen few. We started hanging out as seniors in high school, a couple of ironic drama geeks who cracked each other up. To this day, no one makes me laugh like Bear. I don’t think it was an accident we became friends right after my father died and before I joined the Church. Before and during my conversion, he– a Mormon– was careful never to “plug” the religion (while Julie, our other musketeer, would have given me a lap dance if she thought it’d get me to join). However, when I did convert, he was the valuable “unofficial” guide, the one who pointed out the isms behind the conventions.

The year after we graduated high school, we went on a road trip in my 1973 Toyota FJ40 Land Cruiser. He had recently gotten his mission call to Sweden, and I was getting ready to put in my papers. Outside of Moab, the Cruiser rolled with neither one of us wearing his seat belt. The hard top ripped free, we landed on our backs on top of it, and the Cruiser continued to roll on, smashing all the glass and flattening the top half of the body. When we got to our feet, there wasn’t a scratch on either of us. We, of course, gave the credit to divine intervention.

The fact that we remained friends all these 30+ years means we have volumes of stories– weird, hysterical, pathetic stories, many mind-numbingly banal to anyone else but that would send us into peals of suffocating, tear-streaming laughter. After we bounced around over that time, he ended up a professor at BYU and I became a “creative strategist” for an Internet company. Last summer we went to our 30-year high school reunion and caught up with many others we used to hang out with, and for a short while it felt like we were back in the halls, passing time. But when it was over, it was just the two of us again, driving home and trading notes. Really, I can’t put into words the feelings I have for my friend.

Anyway, the road trip: When Bear’s spring break comes this April, we’ll be flying from our respective parts to Tucson, AZ, rent a car and go see Julie (the lap dancer. not really) in Casa Grande, then drive up to Provo. It’s only a week and not much of an itinerary. Not too much action two middle-aged, married, soft-in-the-middle Mormons could conjure up.

Ah, but what potential damage two seasoned ironic drama geeks could inflict.

Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

’nuff said.