Friends and Strangers

My friend Mack was in town for a quickie visit, and as I headed to meet him at the St. Andrews for a drink the other night I thought about telling my friend Alan, due for a visit just days later, that I’d seen him.
Then it occurred to me: Alan won’t care. He doesn’t know Mack.
This sort of thing happens not infrequently to me. My brain tends not to file friends under geographic or temporal headings, but the fact is those are divisions they arise from.
I’ve lived significant chunks of my life in different places: youth on the Mississippi coast; college in North Mississippi; a few years back on the coast; then to Jackson; then to Nashville; now on Long Island.
All along the way I’ve picked up friends: Furby, McCool, Gary, Sherry, Vaughn, Brad, Ed, Carolyn, Kim, Glenn, Nancy, Tori, Lew, Mona, and so on. They all pretty much rattle around in my head in the same file folder, marked “Active,” no matter how long it‘s been since I saw them.
It’s as if they’re all hanging out at the same nonstop mental party, and I’m the host.
Leaving aside for a minute the fact that I am in reality a terrible host, this concept works quite well for me. Until, as in the case of the other night, I find myself about to refer to one person in conversation with another, and realize that while both are friends to me, they are strangers to each other.
Over the past decade or so this has happened most frequently with my wife (picked up in Nashville, by the way). As a result I’ve learned, for the most part, to attach explainers when mentioning someone she’s hasn’t met: my old high school buddy McCool, for instance. Who, I will sometimes add, was the personable guy everybody gravitated to, sort of like Brad, only not. That way I‘ve linked somebody she does know, Brad, to someone she doesn’t, to strengthen the association.
She usually nods, as if to say, Oh yes, your old high school buddy McCool, etc. Good wives humor husbands like that.
In that same way Mack used to always be “my friend Mack, the comedian.” That changed when Mack came to stay for a couple of days last fall. Now the reference to him is much shorter -- Mack -- in addition to being more meaningful.
With that in mind, I propose that all my friends -- and for this purpose I include my wife -- take it upon themselves to meet one another.
Some had an initial opportunity to do this a few years ago, when I had a 50th birthday party in Jackson and a number of people attended. But not everybody made it, and even among those who did I suspect that no one met everyone. I know I certainly didn’t make enough introductions (see “terrible host,” above) for that to have occurred.
And maybe, in this day of technology, they wouldn’t even have to get together at all. Surely they all have e-mail addresses. They could form some sort of discussion ring, or whatever it is such things are called. Exchange biographical information, perhaps include little essays about how they came to know me, the significance I hold in their lives, that sort of thing. Tell funny stories, taking care not to find the humor too much at my expense.
This would make things simpler for me, without imposing an undue hardship on them. I mean, they’re all good people, or they wouldn’t be on my friends list. They’d be sure to get along fine.
(this needs a better ending. it sort of thuds. i plan to come along and revise it at some point.)