Friends

It was a sunny afternoon, more or less, certainly more so than it has been the last few weeks. The kids and I went outside, and ran a few football drills in the backyard. I know, it's baseball season, we've got these three-player routes though.

Anyway, after doing that for a little while, the neighbors kids and their Mom were outside, so we invited them over. Kids played, we chatted, and somehow while talking about being at home with the kids, and not working in an office, she asked me if I had friends.

Kind of a strange question, although it made a little more sense in the context. Anyway I eventually said, well, most of my friends are the parents of kids in Jack and Kate's classes. Dads I meet through, oh, baseball coaching and whatnot. Used to make friends at work, Boston and Denver and so forth, but not so much with the working from home thing.

She went off on a tangent about her writing and such, while I thought about my lot. All the friends I make are other Dads! Oh sure there is the occasional fantasy football league mate, can't forget those guys. But mostly there's family and other Dads.

Your friends are usually the people you have stuff in common with. I guess that's why if I talk to high school friends, we generally talk about high school stuff, music and old movies maybe; college friends, we talk about, I dunno, the newspaper and drinking; twenty something friends, work. And today's friends, we talk about all that stuff, and our kids. Because really, that's how we became friends, and maybe why we're friends.

So as our neighbor's son busied himself digging a hole in our yard with a trowel, I reflected that the fact the people I coach baseball with, see movies with, and go out drinking with are generally people I meet through my kids just makes sense. We've got more in common with them than our immediate neighbors, sometimes.

I had a couple of other friends this week, of course. The ones I took to Dunkin Donuts on Monday, the Aquarium on Tuesday, and to meet their Mom for lunch on Wednesday. They're not just that, they're not mostly that, but if you spend enough time with someone, they become that. Goodnight, friends.