I organized an event in the community. It was a great success. A large attendance, excellent food. A husband of one of the colleagues came with his 3 friends. These are men in their seventies who have been friends since kindergarten. Seventy years of friendship. Seventy years of witnessing each other’s lives, putting up with each other’s BS, pranking each other, celebrating, sharing meals, working on each other’s cars, watching games, having drinks. Seventy years and counting. The energy from these dudes when they were together was like nothing I ever experienced.
I don’t have that. My life is too neoliberal. I tore myself from a group of very dear friends when I went to grad school. Then another group when I left grad school. I made a close friend here and then she moved. And now it’s simply too late for me to have a 70-year-long friendship with anybody. The capacity to be with people throughout their lives when they aren’t family members is atrophied in me. This is one of the terrible costs of neoliberal lives.
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