Reinvention is easy with someone you only just met.
Let’s hear it for shallow friendships. For friends who are not “good” friends, just friends. Let’s acknowledge the kind of friendships that are lived in the moment, the kind that don’t ask too much, that switch on when you meet, and switch off as you part, without an afterthought, without obligation, without all the complex history and lore that circumscribes old friendships.
Three cheers for the dude who doesn’t know too much about you, nor want anything from you, but listens with exuberance and speaks openly. Let’s drink to the agreeable acquaintance – someone of whom you might think, “We’d have been close if we had met sooner.”
When you start a friendship in later years, with your romancing done and your kids grown and gone and your career already peaked, it’s going to be different from those friendships that started when you were young and had the future to flesh out together.
Back then, while discovering each other, you were discovering human nature through each other. Each new friend was another vital part of the jigsaw of being. You were competing for marks, girls, boys, careers, coolness, places on the team, social rank. You were stealing each other’s vibe, copying each other’s look, so enamoured with each other you were trying to be each other. All the while subconsciously trying to beat each other in the race to, eventually, be somebody.
Old memories are as treasurable as medieval tapestries – look, there’s the little me, bat in hand, and there’s the little you, about to bowl at the little me. But when you’re with old friends you can be so surrounded by and entangled in these ancient tapestries you can’t see out the window to the present.
And they know so much about you, old friends. You can’t bullshit them. You can’t make yourself, even for an hour, the self you’d like to be, and to have been – you’re stuck with who you are and were. The bastards have receipts and aren’t shy about showing them. If you were frightened of girls at school, though you may have been serially married since and currently paying child support in three states, your mates still refer to you as The Monk. “Hello, hello… look who’s wandered in. It’s The Monk.”
With a shallow friend, a new friend, there’s more freedom to shape yourself. And I’m not calling for outright lies, as much as for just enough editing to allow yourself that scrap of dignity that makes beer sweet. You only tell a new friend the things about yourself you want them to know. And he, that delightful fellow, has only told you what he wants you to know. What a pleasure it is to meet, two paragons, on such meticulously curated ground. No need to mention the bankruptcy, or the DUI mix-up.
With old friends you’re locked into the you that was and has always been. But you’re not that person any more. The new friend, the drinking buddy if you will, is introduced to the current you by the curator of the current you, which is the current you. This isn’t as duplicitous as it seems, when you consider the new friend is likely presenting you with a tuxedoed ghoul.
With a shallow friend, a pub friend, you don’t even have each other’s phone number. You walk away from each other and are immediately detached in a way barely possible since the last millennium. You walk away from this conversation, and these couple of pints, and there’s an end of it. It was an atoll of bonhomie, a sojourn of sociableness, like an episode of The Office, or a stopover in Spain.
You don’t have her backstory, other than the bare bones, and it would be considered nosy if you were to delve and probe. Happily, neither does this semi-friend have your backstory. She doesn’t know of your first two wives, the loss, the acrimony. She doesn’t know you failed your final year of law three times, and that legend among your besties has it you finally got honours by giving the dean of the faculty a case of Johnnie Walker and an STD.
I sit having a coffee with Marg, recently met, obviously a smart woman, been around, is funny and sharp and laughing easily – and it’s enough, this first-floor level of familiarity, a lovely place to spend a while. Not knowing all about her is, in its way, more interesting than knowing all about her.
Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
