Accidental Friends

It amazes me how often random meetings can lead to good, long-lasting friendships.

Some meetings are predictable, such as with people we encounter at work, in social organizations or at school. Even those meetings can be random, however. The last name of my best friend in high school starts with L; so does mine. We sat near each other in the alphabetized order of a Catholic high school. He and I are still in touch.

One of the most significant dating relationships of my twenties was with a woman I met at a pizza parlor. I was a DJ there and she came in with friends who had heard this place had a DJ who played oldies on stage. She and I haven’t been close in decades but we are still in touch.

Another long-time friend was a co-worker of hers. We became friends and have remained friends over three decades, even though I now live in Maryland and she now lives in Hawaii.

A friend from Wisconsin has a boyfriend stationed at a military base near here. She is visiting this week. She has known her boyfriend for a year; she’s known me for 28 years. Our accidental meeting was at an electronics store. Her boyfriend at that time was the store manager and I was a radio DJ doing a live show from the store.

Email, a technology I could not have imagined when I met these friends, plays a large role in sustaining the friendships. I can go a decade without seeing the friends I refer to in this post, but we’ll email as little as every few months to as much as every few days. In our letter-writing days, we might be in touch once or twice a year. Phone calls fall somewhere between these two extremes.

Bad grades led to my first romance. I had to repeat chemistry class one summer but there weren’t enough failing chemistry students at my all-boys high school that year, so I went to a nearby all-girls high school. My lab partner and I apparently had chemistry. She and I were an item through the rest of high school and part of college. We eventually went our own separate ways but we’re still in touch.

Perhaps the only meeting more random than that the one in which my wife and I met. She answered my Personals Ad. While it’s true that I was literally advertising for friendship, it is so accidental that I should place an ad on the day of the deadline for that month’s magazine and that she should read that ad the day it came out. Hers was one of fifteen replies to my ad, but hers was THE most interesting.

Are these friendships the result of accidental randomness or fate? Who knows? Either way, I value the friendships as much as family.