Over the last weeks the Star Tribune has been running a series on loneliness. Statistics state there is an epidemic of it. We have been talking about this since Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community was published in 2001. The series has offered ways people have addressed the loneliness in their lives, a loneliness that seems to be present no matter age, gender, occupation, education or economic status  Of course, some of this has been heightened by the isolation many experienced during the pandemic and has lingered, perhaps even grown in the confusion of living into the what next.  People describe how they have searched out making friends. Friends in their neighborhoods. Friends at work. Friends that share interests.Sometimes there is success and other times not so much. 

Friends. As I have read these accounts I was reminded of the Simon and Garfunkel song from my earlier years…

Old friends, old friends
Sat on their park bench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes of the old friends… 

The memory of listening to this song when I was in my twenties always brought about such a melancholy. The image of these people sitting on a park bench was outside my reality and probably something about it conjured a kind of fear in me. It might have actually been a fear of loneliness. Certainly it was a fear of what growing older might mean, might be like.

This past week I had the privilege of spending time with old friends. Friends I had known at the same time as this song was playing on turntables in bedrooms and dorm rooms, spinning sweet sentiment in the hearts of listeners. With this group of old friends, there were no park benches but there was a sense of knowing we had, by this time, lived some life with all its joys, losses, triumphs and failures and that we were there,blessedly present to one another. The melancholy was absent but the knowing and the  laughter and the gratitude was full. 

Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset
The sounds of the city sifting through trees
Settle like dust on the shoulders of the old friends

These old friends and I had made music together in a choir when we were on the cusp of discovering what our grown up lives would be. We had traveled together and had experiences in places far away from anything any of us had known up to that point, experiences most of us had not ever imagined for ourselves. We were shaped and changed by the music making and the travel and the friendships that were forged by it all. The dust that settled on us has recently been stirred up by reunions and memories and a desire to honor what we had together. Though we all now live in different places around the country, we are drawn back to place a marker on what once was and to tip our hats to the places we now find ourselves. This coming together carries a sweetness, a sweetness that I now hear in this song, something I had missed listening with my younger ears.

Friendships come in all shapes and sizes. As the reporting on loneliness describes, it takes effort and intention to overcome. The friendships that endure from childhood and youth are rare as people are more mobile and stray farther from home. The intense friendships we had in college or early adulthood, those we thought would last forever, get interrupted by partners and growing families, by careers, by transience.  As years unfold, friendships get lost and new ones are formed and if we are lucky…or blessed…we find one or two people who are the ones we call our besties. Those that know us for who we are, warts and all, that will walk with us through the mud and mire and can laugh, hard, until we are weak from it all.

Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be 70
Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears.

I think back to the times when I listened to this song and felt all those conflicting feelings about these imagined characters created by the pen of Paul Simon. I know these people now. And I feel such gratitude for knowing there are people with whom I can share fears and memories and maybe even a park bench. 

****Have a listen here…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7A76lTte8qE