Sometimes a thought just hits you out of nowhere, like a poorly thrown baseball at a kid-pitch little league game.
Driving home from work last night with the dotted lines on the pavement zipping by and the headlights of a tailgater uncomfortably close in my rearview mirror, it occurred to me: I have some good friends.
Let me clarify this.
I went through high school and college like everybody else. School-age kids are dumb and mean. I know, I was one of them. I had good friends, of course. But I also had bad friends. Friends who only hung out with me if there wasn’t a better offer. Friends who bailed on me time after time. Friends who were nice to me one-on-one but picked on me to win points with a crowd.
But I’m not just a victim here. I’m just as guilty of all those things as the kids who did them to me. I even bullied kids in school. I’m not proud of it. Maybe I don’t deserve to have good friends. To this day, I have a selfish streak a mile wide. Often, I only want to talk about me. I don’t always ask how my friends are doing until I’ve told them how I’m doing. Maybe my friends struggle with the same battle on the inside and just don’t show it. With friends like me, who needs enemies, m’right?
But in spite of my shortcomings, I have some quality friends these days. On Sunday, one of them paid me a compliment publicly in front of a crowd of people. The day before that, another friend drove an hour from Hendersonville just to talk and hand me tools while I worked on my rusty old truck. Yesterday, one friend texted me out of the blue and told me that a piece of advice I’d given him was ringing in his ears.
So driving down the road yesterday evening, a warmness fell over my chest as these thoughts churned through my head. I matter to someone. Multiple someones. Why should anyone care what I think? And yet, there are people in my life that ask my opinion. They tell me how nice I look today, or that I did a good job of this or that. That hasn’t always been.
If the joyous tear-jerking moment in It’s a Wonderful Life is to be believed - that the man is truly rich who has friends - then I have arrived.
Hopefully, if you’re reading this you have some friends like mine, who think about you enough to send you a message during the day. Hopefully, you have people that value your opinion and want you in their lives. If you don’t, I think you’ll find that there are indeed several people in this world that do want to know you. Go find them and make their lives a little richer.