Dear Father, Dear Son by Larry Elder

Author:Larry Elder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WND Books
Published: 2012-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

16

GOOD FRIENDS

“Why don’t you have friends?”

How can someone have no one to go places with, no one to talk to, no one to help work out problems, no one to share ideas, no one just to relax around and do nothing. How is that possible? How could he be happy?

“I’ve always been a loner,” he said.

“I know, but why?”

“Only child, I guess. Always been on my own. And it’s hard to find a good friend. A real one. You’re lucky if you can find one or two. If you think you have more than that, your judgment’s bad.”

“So, Mom has bad judgment?”

“You said that,” he laughed. “I didn’t.”

My mother’s friends were interesting and positive, full of “piss and vinegar” as Mom said. Each one had something special. Along with friends, she had loads of relatives—uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews—more than enough to make up for Dad’s none.

“I think you’re wrong about that one, Dad.”

When Mom found a friend, she kept her. But she didn’t make friends easily. That was certainly the case with Mrs. Jeffries.

When I went away to college, only one other kid from my high school also went, Frank Jeffries. I didn’t know him well in high school. We had a couple of mutual friends, but that was about it. I’d heard he got accepted to my college, and I was hoping he would go somewhere else.

“Why?” Dad asked, “Wouldn’t you want someone from your same high school goin’ to your college? Goin’ off to a new place—you’d be there with somebody you know.”

No, part of the point in going to school far away is to reinvent yourself. It took a while to learn that everybody feels that way. In my case, I was shy—too shy. College provided me a chance to start over in a new school and transform myself into someone more confident and assertive. But with Frank there, he’d know “the new me” was a performance.

Frank and I did become friends. He always encouraged me when I hit a tough spot in the classroom. He predicted greater things for me than I did.

“You got the talent,” he’d say.

I insisted that he had more. We even debated the issue.

“This is a pretty stupid thing to debate don’t you think?” I said in the middle of it. “What happens if I win?”

He taught me about jazz, Impressionist painters, and saltwater fish. He had studied math, chemistry, biology, and French. I called him “The Renaissance Man” and said he was born in the wrong century and the wrong country.

We debated politics and, when he took a course in economics, I started losing more arguments than usual. So I took economics to try to even things up.

I learned about the damage done by minimum-wage laws, the cost of unnecessary regulations on business, and that competition results in better-quality and lower-priced goods—the same things my Dad had always said, in his simpler fashion.

“And I never took no economics,” Dad said, laughing.

“No, you just practiced it.”

One evening, Frank and I were sitting on the floor of his dorm room listening to music.

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