What friendship means to me

A panhandler stopped me on the street and said: ???Groove, tomorrow is Easter, and I haven???t got an egg in the house.??? Such vagrants as we have in our town usually call me by my first name. So I bought him an egg. The other day at a downtown corner a especially seedy fellow caught my eye. ???Can you let me have a dime for a cup of coffee???? he almost whispered.

???Brother,??? I said, ???You don???t want a cup of coffee. You want a drink.??? I smiled right into his unhappy eyes. Contrary to popular practice, a smile brings out the truth much faster than a stern look.

???Yes,??? he said, ???I sure do.??? Hazlitt, the 19th-century British essayist, wrote: ???One cannot expect people to be other than they are.??? That idea has guided me on the greatest adventures of friendship. With these vagrants, I tried to put myself in the place of each one, and acted as I hoped some understanding person might have acted toward me. You do not choose your friend from the dreary ranks of beggars; neither do I, but it seems to me these simple instance are illustrative of the pervasive spirit of friendship.

For to be a friend you have to care about people, what they think, what they feel, what they suffer. If you don???t like people, you may still be cordial to acquaintance, but friendship is no go. You must try to understand people, their hopes and fears and aspirations. At least a remnant of the dignity of the human being shines somehow through the rags of the tramp who craves a drink and the one who needs an egg for Easter.

Friendship stumbles most often on the rock of inconvenience. Most of us have an abundance of good impulses which we either forget or find it convenient to translate into actuality. In my experience I have found most men kind-hearted. They are usually willing to do generous things, if they can do them without much personal inconvenience. They are thoughtful of the sorrow and the needs of others ??? if they have time and the occasion is not too difficult.

Take the story of the Good Samaritan, on the road that led from Jerusalem down to Jericho. There were many who traveled on it. Among them was one who was deep in trouble and lay helpless at the roadside. Two prominent citizens hurried by ??? good, average men, probably, generous in impulse, accustomed to going to church on a Sunday morning. Perhaps they were members of the Jericho Lions or Kiwanis or Rotary Club.

But this day on the Jericho road it was getting late. They were bound for supper and an evening at home. Perhaps good old So-and-So was coming in, and it would be nice to open a bottle of the older wine and be warm. Too bad about the poor fellow across the road. Probably a drunk. He did look a bit sad with that black eye, but, then, somebody would doubtless pick him up.
No, I have a hunch the Good Samaritan was much the same kind of chap as the two prominent citizens. Probably he, too, was thinking of a pleasant evening soon to come. It was just as late for him as for the other two. Yet he reached down into the gutter, set the poor devil on his beast and took him to the inn. And he gave a bit of money to the landlord and said: ???Take care of him, and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again I will repay thee.???

You see, the Samaritan had a kind heart plus, and it???s only the kind heart plus that goes all the way. Every morning each one of us goes out on the Jericho road. Yet no matter what a good-natured, well-meaning citizen you or I may be, no matter what a hearty, handshaking member of the luncheon-every-Thursday service club, if we haven???t the plus which makes us humbly willing to take inconvenient action, we are only jolly good fellows, and the Jericho road will never be smoother because we walked that way.

Friendship is a plant that has to be cultivated; it must be watered and tended if it is to produce sweet and wholesome fruit. Just for example, I am an inveterate note taker. When it occurs to me, day or night, that someone I know has done a particularly nice piece of work, and could use a word of appreciation, or is sick and needs an inquiry, I write it down as something to do. I realize, of course, that I am selfish about it because I enjoy doing it.

The more I pursue my favorite study, the study of human nature, the more I wonder that so many people care to spend so much time and thought and worry about other people???s business. Often men come to me and say: ???I know you are close to Jones and I think you ought to tell him that he is making a mistake to do the things he is doing, or failing to do the things he is not doing.???

This leaves me cold. I shall not put off my friends??? lives and try to make them run the other way. I find there are barely enough hours in the day in which to correct some of my own faults and mistakes, and I invariably have a lot left over at sundown.

Friendship, to me, is an intangible thin, a kind of circle which completely surrounds another person, taking him in with all his good points and all his bad, enveloping him in his entirely. If I come to like a man and friendship is formed it is because I have discerned something a character and fineness, although from time to time he may, as we all do, violate that which is fine and which is customarily a part of him. If he is my friend, there are two thins which I shall not think of doing. First, I shall not hurt him, and second, I shall not cross him off my list because he was drunk or disorderly or thoughtless. To me it is cruel to criticize a friend in other that a light way. I prefer to leave criticism to his mere acquaintances. Inasmuch as they are not his friends they cannot hurt him.

My mind goes back to a young man in a bank, long ago, who one or two occasions had been careless in his habits, although those who knew him best realized that he was a man of sound ability and good character. A group of associates went to the president of the bank and suggested that the young man be diminished. Whereupon the president, who was old and kind and had seen a great deal of life, called a meeting. And when the executives were all sitting about, the old gentleman said gently. ???Now let him who is without sin cast the first stone.???

In the midst of a deafening silence the meeting adjourned.

To be a friend, in the deeper sense, may sometimes mean that you will be set down as an easy mark, a pushover. Most of the easy marks I have known have been a great deal happier than the smart little people who fooled them. The fullest of life is one which has contained the richest experience, even though some of those experiences may have eventually led to disillusionment and to disappointment. Once I heard my friend Raymond Swing say: ???I should rather believe in something and be wrong than to believe in it and be right.??? So with the man who has my friendship.

Friendship inevitably affects the body as well as the spirit. I doubt if it is possible to hate anybody and be completely healthy. Physicians agree that resentment fosters poison in the human system. It is not possible to love everybody, or even to like everybody, but at least, when there is no friendly response, the robe of tolerant indifference can be put on. I have in mind a man who lived on a level above the mean resentments of life, and in nearly 80 years I don???t believe he was ever ill enough to require the services of a physician. He was my father.

I am sure there are more good friends and good friendships in the world than we realized. From close observation of human beings I have come to the conclusion that the average person is better, not worse, than he seems to be. I have more than once discovered that men whom their fellow call selfish, ungenerous, hard, are almost daily enraged in the odds and ends of a thousand little kind and thoughtful acts. I have found many a soft conscience in a hard coat and many of the deeper qualities of friendship in an inarticulate man.

One who is genuinely friendly ought not to be too critical of his acquaintances who are tactless, undiplomatic, and rarely express thanks or show gratitude. So many deeply, but do not have the gift of expression. Some who seem rude are only shy. Some who seem ungrateful are only timid. On the other side, there are people who find it easier to talk than feel. These unfortunates lack the master quality of sincerity. Insincerity may have a pleasant sound but rings no silver bells of truth. Insincerity is the tinkling cymbal of human relationship.

Above all, friendship means to me the immeasurable capacity for forgiveness. It means the ability to check off resentment, rather than let it persist and poison the spirit. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: ???He is a green hand at life who cannot forgive any mortal thing.??? There is no more enduring thing in life than real friendship. If it is not enduring then it is not real, and has never quite found its way from the far-flung fields of acquaintances to the inner circle of devotion.