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WHEN I WAS YOUNG, my parents converted our basement into an indoor playground for the neighborhood kids.
My friends could listen to Elvis belt out Hound Dog or croon Love Me Tender on the Seeburg jukebox. Some chose instead to light up the Bally pinball machine. Others would challenge my father to a game of pool. Meanwhile, my mother would create mini-pizzas for everyone, with a slice of Swiss cheese drenched in tomato sauce on half an English muffin.
All this was done in the interest of jump-starting their son’s social development, but my parents underestimated my devotion to solitude. While all the mayhem raged below, I could often be found hiding out in my room, reading about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot.
I’ve always felt more comfortable with others one-on-one than in a group, routinely flouting cocktail etiquette in favor of serious conversation at a corner table. I gravitated toward a profession that prioritizes relating in depth. I also married a woman who thrives on social contact, thus compensating for my more introverted nature.
But while I’ve largely overcome my shyness in groups, thanks to my own psychotherapy, my focus remains individual relationships. lndeed, I’ve been determined to nurture a few long-ago friendships, rather than letting them fall by the wayside, as many men do. That brings me to Charlie and Chernoff.
Charlie. Money has been front and center in Charlie’s life, as it sometimes has been in mine. We meet for a pancake breakfast weekly and talk freely about our marital dramas, kids and health. The most investment savvy of my friends, Charlie and his wife own a pair of duplexes, which—to my amazement as a mechanical know-nothing—they manage completely hands-on.
He has contributed religiously to a retirement account at Vanguard Group ever since I recommended Windsor Fund to him almost 50 years ago. Despite the similarity in our interests and background, Charlie and I reconnected only recently after a long hiatus. We needed time to heal after he was suspended from graduate school, an incident I described in an earlier article.
Like many of us, Charlie was unnerved by the 2008 financial crisis. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, he switched whole hog out of all his stock funds, except Windsor, and into intermediate-term Treasurys. He profited from bond interest and price appreciation as rates continued to decline, though he’d have fared far better if he’d stayed the course with his stock funds. Looking back, Charlie attributes his instinctive flight from the ravaged stock market to a reactivation of primitive fears, with those fears further exacerbated by his family’s trauma during the Holocaust.
Chernoff. At college, some guys were called by a nickname. Others were known by their surname, which was the case with Chernoff. Decked out in British Alan Paine sweaters and Cole Haan loafers, sensitive, and well-versed in the fine arts, he was popular with the prized shiksas on campus.
Meanwhile, I was dubbed Abe, beneficiary of a nouveau riche background, driving an unkempt silver Corvette with a loud rev. Chernoff and I bonded instantly the day he arrived at the fraternity, unknowingly drawn together by our mutual depression.
One day, not long after the semester began, Chernoff and I were sipping Dr. Brown’s cream sodas at the local deli when he startled me with a revelation: His persona was a sham. His father went bankrupt when he was in high school and the family compensated with pretense. There was no money, only a second mortgage and credit card debt. He couldn’t have afforded a private university without a scholarship.
Driven to suppress the shame, Charlie unconsciously adopted his parents’ playbook of deceit. He would later marry an Oscar-winning Hollywood actress for, as he now says, all the wrong reasons. When they divorced several years later, he missed the glamour he so craved and, with family and close friends all back East, he felt bereft.
Although my friend went on to produce several mainstream movies, only one was a box-office success and couldn’t, by itself, finance his grand lifestyle. Unlike me, Chernoff never hit the psychiatric medication jackpot, and has become unconsolably depressed. Now stricken with Parkinson’s, he feels his career merely recapitulated his father’s financial failure.
Charlie and Chernoff are my main guys. I love them and the depths to which they’ve allowed our relationship to go. Even good friends are often hesitant to share episodes of financial shame, and I feel blessed to have found two who are willing to confide in me.
Left unpeopled, retirement can be a stark and scary place. Close friendships are hard to cultivate, but they’re out there for those who dare to look. I’d encourage you to honor the friendships you have, and give them the attention they deserve.
Steve Abramowitz is a psychologist in Sacramento, California. Earlier in his career, Steve was a university professor, including serving as research director for the psychiatry department at the University of California, Davis. He also ran his own investment advisory firm. Check out Steve’s earlier articles.
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I’m calling my brother-in-law right now! Thanks for the reminder.
I agree. I am fortunate to have longtime friends, 40, 50, even 70+ years that I stay in contact with. It’s wonderful!
Great. I’m trying to get where you’ve already gotten.
Steve, thanks for a great article. I too crave a small friend group in fact, my closest two friends are my college roommate and my law school roommate. We’ve stayed close over 30 plus years and are more like brothers to me. However, neither one is close so I need an everyday friend, but…can’t seem to find one. I may be too picky, I need someone and at this stage, I might have to develop friendship with folks I really don’t like at first. It’s hard, much easier to stay at home and read a good book and play with my dog.
Here’s my take on what you’ve just shared. Try not to be too picky at first. Remember, all relationships, even with good friends, have their rough spots and disappointments, but these may be far outweighed by how gratifying they are in many other respects. His occupation, his politics and his upbringing might be very different from yours, but you may share so much at a deeper level, like an early parental death, divorce or past bouts with alcohol.
Thanks Steve
Thanks so much, Steve, for your encouragement to reach out to friends from the past whom you have missed. Karen, though only five months older than me, was my “big sister” for the first six years of our lives when we lived in the same apartment building. Though we kept in touch until she married, the contact faded, while our moms remained friends. But in 2018, with her mother long gone, I found Karen on Facebook and we’ve been in regular contact ever since. This past Christmas, another childhood friend reached out to me when she got my contact info from her cousin, to whom I am tangentially connected. We hope to meet in person the next time we are both visiting our kids who live in St. Louis 🤞🏻.
Facebook may have its shortcomings, but as in your case it became a source of relationship renewal. I am no longer surprised when I learn that many deep friendships—and love relationships—are nurtured through online contact.
Being bereft of immediate family and having no kids, I’ve always been concerned about the possibility of a socially empty seniorhood, so I pay a lot of attention to maintaining and nurturing my precious friendships. My best pals all live quite a distance from my new home in Seattle, so there’s nobody I can go to lunch with, but I pick up the phone to call one or another at least once a week.
Unlike just about everybody else in the world, however, I have no school friends. Zero. Never did. I didn’t like the kids in grammar school and high school, and they didn’t like me. I wasn’t lonely, just isolated. College was definitely lonely, but I was mostly focused on just jamming through it before I ran out of money.
I met my oldest friend when we were 25 and co-anchoring a TV newscast in Fresno, California. I had food poisoning one night on set, and during a commercial break I puked into his wastebasket. Instant friendship, 42 years now. My other best pals are two former clients, a soccer buddy, my onetime realtor, a guy I got elected to the local fire board, my cousin in Israel, a fellow Everton soccer fan in England, a woman I sang with on a European choir tour, my late father’s best friend (now 93) and a lovely lady whose heart I broke.
But school? As it happens, just last night I was reading through the massive list of attendees for my 50th high school reunion in Chicago this August, and I realized that there wasn’t one person there whom I’d been friends with, or was particularly curious about. The only guy in my class with whom I would have wanted to reconnect has passed away. And I realized that the idea of flying across the country to party with strangers was more than a bit loony. So I changed my Will You Attend? button from “yes” to “no” and closed the page.
What a wonderful and rich comment! I once read that boredom is the mother of creativity. In your case it was isolation and not boredom. But it motivated you to seek out the kind of friendships you may have sought in school but never quite made. Clearly you have succeeded in more than compensating for those earlier disappointments.
Thank you, Steve, but I do envy you the proximity of your pancake pal. I’m still hoping to develop a local friendship so I’m not forever a table-for-one!
Sorry for taking so long to respond. I missed your follow-up the first time around! Mike, I have every confidence that you will succeed in finding a local guy. Don’t “close the page” on looking around and settle for that table-for-one. You have so many experiences to share and so ready to learn and grow from having a close friend nearby.
Try being more forward. Unless you are talking to someone much younger, you both know that time is not unlimited. “Can you sit for a cup of coffee?” “Want to meet at the pickleball court tomorrow?”
Steve, I’m very fortunate to find in retirement that I have a large circle of friends from a number of different sources. Yet I still sometimes wonder about a few folks from high school or college or my first marriage that drifted away. Maybe I’ll try to reconnect . . . but maybe I won’t, because the ones in the here-and-now are the real friends.
I know what you mean. I left New York for college in Chicago and then to to the West Coast. I have lost touch with all of my high school friends. My wife Alberta has lived in California all her life and has been able to keep in touch with many of her former neighbors and friends. I think of this missing piece of my life often. We will be traveling to New York in a few months, when I am hoping to locate a couple of the people who played such an important role in my personal development.
Steve, Thanks for the nudge to reach out to a few buddies I haven’t heard from in a couple of years. Deep friendships take years to cultivate, and worth the continuing effort needed to maintain.
Yes, usually years to cultivate and to develop. Sometimes you might meet someone on just a social occasion and find the conversation going real “deep.” This may be a person you want to get to know better and see if a new relationship can flourish.