“What?  Another post about Ender’s Game?  You must like that book.”

“Yes.”

Moving on:

I have quite a few people in my life who carry the title of “friend.”  I’ve always viewed that as a strength and still do.  I can become friends with almost anybody, I think.  That’s my superpower.  It makes me a good teacher, and it surrounds me with people willing to give me the support necessary for success.  I need an abundance of that, personally.

Recently, though, the reality of my friend situation dawned on me, and the dawning lit something extremely challenging to wrap a head around.

My friendships are abundant and characterized by deep care.  All of them.  The reciprocation of that care is impossible to know surely, but at least from one side, it is genuine.  As it turns out, however, care alone does not measure a friendship, at least not adequately.

I had a marriage ceremony recently (yay!), and a very old friend of mine attended from across the country to be an usher.  Back in the day of hay, we had been inseparable.  Due to some extenuating circumstances involving a few poor decisions and a police officer or two, however, we went our separate ways.

~That story is long so I won’t post it here, but it isn’t as bad as it sounds~

We talked only sparingly after that, and more than 12 years have passed since.

You could imagine that the day before my wedding I was all over the place.  Shuttling Japanese inlaws around town, picking up last-minute decorations, scrambling up ladders, ordering and delivering pizzas, teaching aforementioned inlaws to shoot, and any other odd task you might think up I could have been found doing at some point that day.

In all of that, still wiped out from the previous day of flying and transit and car rentals, my friend showed up early and “What can I do to help?” came out of his mouth before anything else.  I told him to relax, but instead of doing that he jumped in the car with me and called up my mom, whom he hadn’t talked to for an even more extended period than me, and asked what he could do.  She gave him the same list of chores that bounced around in my head.

We had no idea what was going on in each others’ lives, but it made no difference.  We worked as a team with little in the way of words passing between us.  He made sure my inlaws (who speak a hand full of English words) got food on time, helped me teach them how to shoot at the firing range, and generally assisted in tasks with the silent efficiency that only a best friend can.

I don’t mean to say that we didn’t talk.  We constantly chattered about everything throughout the day, just not about the work we were doing.  I realized at that point that he is a different caliber of a friend to me than all of my others.  Despite the illusion that we had grown apart, we operated with the same closeness as we had on our last adventure together.  What a happy discovery.

Care, understanding, and something profound, like the roots of two trees intertwining, to paraphrase Ender (Orson Scott Card) one more time.  The trees may grow separately, but underneath it all, they never part in truth.

So that’s what I thought about when I read about Ender’s reunion with his old buddy Alai: My own overdue reunion with the man who, as it turns out, still holds the title of Best and Oldest friend to me.

~M