A couple of weeks ago, we went to a lecture by Arlene Gottfried at the Minnesota Center for Photography. They’re currently showing her series entitled Midnight*, a 25-year portrait series of a close friend with schizophrenia. As she worked her way through the slides, she told us a little about the drifting nature of their friendship, about the sudden phone calls from the middle of nowhere after he'd suddenly taken a bus 2,000 miles west. The times she had to commit him to various institutions, find him work, find him aid. And the fact that he'd last disappeared six months ago. 25 years of this.

Soon after that, Mister Husband began to sift through his long friendship with Slim. Slim was an artist and a punk to the core, and every bit as wonderful and difficult as those words might imply. There was more distance between them in last decade, since they lived halfway across the country from each other and pursued very different lives, but a series of small communications showed they were never very far from each other’s thoughts.

This has made me think about the fact that I don’t really keep friends. Not even normally difficult people, much less brilliantly, dramatically fucked-up ones. There are some rare exceptions, of course. D and I met when I was 19 and he was 35, and we still keep in touch 12 years later. G. and I met in the fall of 2000 and are still very close. I feel fiercely loyal to both of them, and I know I could also ask them for anything. But neither of them is particularly difficult, or even inconvenient. They probably put up with a lot more out of me than I ever do out of them. G has friends from her old Polish neighborhood that she’s known her whole life. Husband and M. have been close for 30 years now. There’s nobody that I’ve known since I was wee, or even in high school. I branched off so differently that I can’t imagine what I’d say to the people I knew then, and I always avoid reunions.

I spent some time wondering if this makes me a bad person. In the end, I don’t think so. Part of it is that I’m an only child who is also by nature an introvert. It’s fair to say that I have rather low social needs. I’m the sort of person who prefers to have two or (maybe) three close friends rather than a flock of more general friends and acquaintances. Deafness is also a factor: I much prefer to go to lunch or dinner with one or two people, simply because I can’t follow the conversation in a larger crowd. You have to have a certain level of interest and commonality and just plain like to devote consistent hours to conversation like that. This sort of close involvement is a lot of work to maintain, and I’m not willing to do it for many people. I also don’t expect that many people to be able to do it for me.

*Be sure to check out "Mommie" and "The Eternal Light" also. Very strong stuff.