August 18, 2007 | Papa Smith

Friends will cost you something

Its true. You should not have friends if you wish to never be broken, bruised, battered, beleagered, or bitten. However, you will also miss out on things like this:

The last couple of weeks have been rich with friends as we finish our time here in Philadelphia. I’ve had some particularly rich time with my friend Dave recently as we drank some good beers and talked a bit about being fathers, what’s next in life, and wondered together, how, despite our lack of anything resembling faith, Jesus was going to keep us trucking along, learning somehow to love.

Real Men Die Slowly Without Attention

One of the things I’ve read this year, that stirred me up about the wonders of companionship among dudes has been the book Samson and the Pirate Monks. One of the core nuggets of reason in this read, has been that if a man is to be a man who dies among friends he will have first had to live willingly among them. This means, he will have had to need them. He will have had to be challenged by them. He will have had to risk challenging them. He will have had to be both strong and weak with them. But not all men mind you, only those whom have chosen one another, in mutual respect and need, to engage in the daily exercise of transparency – which for a man, is like stepping in front of a car everyday (without the benefit of doing it for glory). I know no man for whom that exercise comes naturally, but I now consider the men who risk it, to be the toughest lot I have ever met.

Friends are made out of !*#%!@ shared.

Go ahead, (insert your favorite term for it). This is also true. I’ve rarely developed any meaningful friendship with anyone where we didn’t share a common bond of having made it through a common crappy experience, whether it was with one another, as in marriage, or with a common struggle, as in parenting.

Amy has mentioned our friends, Matt, Marcie, Olivia, and wee HUGE Nigel across the street before. They need mentioning again. As we leave for South Carolina, I am struck by the fact that although we share our faith with our church community, our most daily and endearing friendship is with our neighbors, whom we will sorely miss as we depart.

We have never had neighbors like these. How many gallons of margarita have we drunk over the past 2 years? How many times have we heard Olivia and Brighton yell to one another across the street? How many times have I dropped asparagus through the bars in your grill? How often have we laughed with gusto and felt known with you? I mean, you introduced us to GOOD Sushi! (I think I’m going to cry :).

This is goodbye

We will leave in about ten days. This is cuckoo. Undoubtabley, I will cry enough for both Amy and I. I’m so dramatic. Sheesh.