A Proof of Concept—When is a Friend?

“You have more friends than you know.” That’s what he said as we were saying goodbye. I’d run into Howard at the Milan airport, both of us returning home to America after a four-month Semester-in-Florence.  We hadn’t strung more than four sentences of conversation together during those months.  Howard was one of the Cool Guys, one of the cliques among the 50 American students in the program. I hadn’t been invited to join any of them.

“You have more friends than you know.” At first, I thought it was a throw-away salutation. I do not know what it was about those words, but I have carried that sentence with me for 60 years and have come to believe in its truth. So, it stayed.   

During that semester one of the other Cool Guys asked to join me on a week-end. On week-ends I’d hitch-hike up and down the Autostrada on my own and visit the Italian towns and villages instead of hanging with the Americans. Maybe she wondered where I would go because I was never at the weekend student events. Maybe she thought that I could be Cool. I never asked her why. I told her I was going to Orvieto, about 90 miles from Florence because I wanted to see for myself the Signorelli Last Judgment. I’d seen it printed in a book-- his audacious application of unusual colors…. and the mind-bending contortions he required of his models as he painted the figures in Hell. 

Mary was OK with that. I quickly learn the advantage to having a female with long blond hair as a hitch-hiking companion. We stood at the entrance of the Autostrada heading south. She stands in front of me, I put out my thumb, and we get a ride before I can tell her that sometimes you have to wait a while. 

It is still afternoon when we check into a local hotel, separate rooms. We go to the Duomo and stand in front of The Signorelli. I have no recollection of our conversation, but we must have talked about it at dinner in the family bistro. I remember that we walked together to the outskirts of the town without holding hands. We were sitting on the towering walls of Orvieto, a medieval village that had escaped change for five hundred years. The walls bordered the edge of a plateau overlooking a long valley. It was sunset, and Mary asked me what I saw. 

Before going to Italy, I saw only in black-and-white. By studying the richly colored  Renaissance paintings on the walls of churches, museum, and palaces, I began to see in Technicolor. I described to her the colors reflecting off the atmosphere’s moisture, from brilliant pastels to darkening hues of evening. I don’t recall asking her what she saw.  She told me-- “I see the energy of the valley, the spirit of this place.” I recorded those words, carried them with me for decades before one day I came to. I came to understand what she meant. Where I saw reflection, she saw radiance.

All that came back to me as clear as I had lived it when Tara asked me during Table Topics on March 5th, “What are your three requirements for friendship?” But instead of talking about those moments, I began rattling off words like segments, separate links of a long chain twitching on the ground. I talked about the fact that a friend would have to accept me, be interested in my activities. I never said that I had to accept the other person or be interested in his activities. I mentioned that a friend is different from an acquaintance or a colleague, you have “something” special with them. I surrounded the concept I was looking for with as many phrases as I could, but I never found it.

A few minutes later, in answer to Tara’s Table Topic question about Respect, Vanessa said that the people she respected “…were there for her.” Why didn’t I think to say that? Friends are there for you, and you are there for your friends. 

Why do we remember what people have said?

Like when David said during one of his speeches at EZ-Speakers, “I just want to be heard.” Imagine saying that at Toastmasters.  “I just want to be heard.” And then, in February Tuyen told us, “The secret of life is hidden in our daily routine. You can never change your life until you change one thing in it.” Words fix themselves upon our minds as if they were viruses seeking a source of energy to stay alive.

When I want an answer and can’t find it in my experience or in conversation with another, I turn to one of Shakespeare’s tragedies….the one where the dying hero asks of his friend, “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart…..tell my story.” It became as clear as I can see your faces now. Howard, Mary, Tara, Vanessa, David, Tuyen were opening up to us…through words forming stories or words used as questions.  And those stories and questions open us. Relationship, that was the word I’d been looking for.

So, when is a friend? When a person moves you even a single degree from your usual way of seeing the world. A spoken word and act that turns you away from a narrow self toward a larger world so you see yourself in your true portion. 

I’m not going to give you a call to action to recapitulate for yourselves those words friends have spoken to you so you can see that “You have more friends than you know.” Instead, I warn you to be careful.  Someone might say something here at Toastmasters. Someone might just want to be heard, someone might want to change just one thing, and you might find yourself in relationship with a friend.