Never enough friends to start throwing them away

"Nothing is more important than friendship. Not fame. Not money. Not death."
-- BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY

There is a scene in the movie "Tombstone" when an acutely ill Doc Holliday leaves his sickbed to help Wyatt Earp in a gunfight Earp can't win alone.

Turkey Creek Jack Johnson asks, "Doc, you oughta be in bed, what the hell you doin' this for anyway?"

Holliday responds, "Wyatt Earp is my friend."

Johnson replies, "Hell, I got lots of friends."

Doc Holliday

Holliday has the topper. "I don't."

The real Doc Holliday was born in the town where I live now, Griffin, Ga., and he only lived to be 36 years old. I've got clothes older than that.

I've also got four friendships quite a bit older than that. One dates back to middle school, another to high school and the other to the early 1970s. One was someone I lost track of for nearly 30 years, but when we re-established contact, we picked up where we left off.

I have had other good friends, one of them dating back to high school and the other two that I acquired in adulthood. Two died, one unexpectedly. The other -- a close friend for nearly 15 years -- got angry over a disagreement and terminated our friendship.

It was one of the biggest disappointments of my life.

It reminded me of the way Stephen King ended his novella "The Body," made into the movie "Stand By Me" in 1986.

"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"

Or maybe a line that says it even better was written by the late Harry Chapin in his song, "Let Time Go Lightly:"

"Old friends, they mean much more to me than the new friends, cause they can see where you are and they know where you've been."

One of my oldest friends seems to be disappearing. I don't know if he is doing it intentionally or if it's just happening without him noticing, but it is definitely happening. He has lived much of his life with repressed memories and in late middle age he started remembering what had happened to him.

All he will say is that it was bad, very bad, but he won't talk about it. In fact, he doesn't tell me anything about his life. He gives me his thoughts on Donald Trump, taxation and the evil Democrats. He's against two of the three and kind of murky on the other one.

But I have no idea how the coronavirus is affecting his life or any of the things he has learned about his past.

I guess it's really none of my business.

The thing is, I haven't got lots of friends.