“I’ll Be There For You” (S)

If you recognize my title, you were most likely one of the approximately 52.5 million people who tuned in regularly to watch the hit show, Friends (1994-2004). Or, you might have been a fan of The Rembrandts, who performed the song for the show, and then went on to expand and record the song for their third album a year later. The show ended 20 years ago but has been in the news lately with Mathew Perry’s untimely passing (Oct. 2023).

What follows is not really about the show per se; however, it does play a very big part in why I chose to write what you are about to read. My friendship with Steve, Butch (more on that name and the pendant later), and Mike began when I was 12 (the other three go back even further), making it a friendship of 61 years and counting. When I first thought of the idea to write about my friendship with these three dudes, the first thing that popped into my head, for some reason was the show, quickly followed by me saying to myself: “Wait, I have a friend Michael (different one) here in Los Angeles who actually was a writer on that show.” Those thoughts came exactly a year ago, and the next day I wrote my friend an email:

Hey Michael, I hope Italy is treating you well. As you know, I have been writing stories about my past and some of my childhood friends for my blog, and I got this idea to write a kind of culminating piece about this friendship with my three buddies. Despite my departure 40 years ago from the city in which the three of them still live, when we had a Zoom call the other day, it only took about five minutes before the conversation sounded like we had never been separated by time or distance, kind of picking up where we left off. So, I wanted to pick your brain, about your time on the show, for things like how it got its name, and how the idea of “friendship” factored into the writing and the various plot lines and predicaments of the episodes. Thanks in advance, Ciao, North.

His response the next day was as follows:

As far as “Friends” goes, it got that title long before I was there, I think the creators just eventually landed on a title so simple (but also so obvious) that it’s become ironic . . .The basic idea in the foundation of the story-telling on “Friends” was that at this particular stage in your life [late twenties early thirties when the show began] , when things might not be going as planned, when you don’t have the job you thought you’d have, or your dating world sucks, you still have your friends to fall back on. They might be life-long friends, or they might be more recent friends, but if they are true friends they have your back.

After reading Michael’s response, I realized that becoming friends when you are in your late twenties, early thirties is, not surprisingly, very different than forming friendships in your teen years. I also realized that while there can and will be similarities in developing friendships in either age bracket (late 20s early 30s or as teenagers), the timeframe for when those friendships developed (what decade or century for that matter) might also dictate how those friendships evolved. For example, my buddies and I were 13 in 1963/64, the start of our high school years, and we all graduated in 1968 when we were 17, with two of us soon to turn 18 later that year. What would a comparison of similar types of teen friendships that developed from 2019/20 to 2023 look like?  I would venture to say that what was available to us, like “outside” stimulus, not to mention what was going on in the world in those different time periods, might make a huge difference in how those friendships manifested.

As one can imagine, there have been a myriad of studies done over the years about adolescence and the nature of relationships that develop during that period of a young man’s or woman’s life. The most obvious conclusion of many of these studies is that teens “spend an increasingly more time in the company” of their peer group, and less and less time with parents and family members. Because of this, these friendships gradually deepen “in terms of levels of commitment, intimacy, and acceptance of differences among friends.” While childhood friendships tend to be based on common activities, teen friendships “expand to include similarities in attitudes, values, and shared activities.” To put all this into a 13-year-old’s language: “Hey, you like to play ball, so do I, let’s be friends!”

The friendship between myself (Irwin), Steve, Mike, and Butch started in May of 1963, when my parents decided it was time to move to a new neighborhood. Okay, now seems like the right time to address that name. The story I remember being told, is that Edward, or Ed, was born with flaming red hair, and his parents hadn’t decided on a name yet for their new son but did not want people to start calling him “Red,” so they chose Butch, which also morphed into Butchie over the years. (Please keep in mind that this was 1951)!  Now you know. Back to the move. As the movers were unloading the truck, I was hanging around supervising this work (also known as being a pain in the ass), when this kid walked up to me and said: “Hi, my name is Steve, do you want to go to the park and play some ball?” I said, “Sure,” and then ran upstairs to tell my Mom that I was going to the park with my new friend, Steve. I am sure you can imagine the look on her face, considering that we had been in the neighborhood for all of a half hour. But, to the park I went, much to the delight of the movers.

Shortly after this event, Steve introduced me to two of his other friends, Butch and Mike, and the friendship of the “four amigos,” as someone once dubbed us, began, long before that film with a similar title. The friendship really started to formulate that September when we were all starting at the same high school (Sir Winston Churchill) in the Montreal suburb of Ville St. Laurent, Quebec. Every morning and afternoon for four years (not five in those days), Steve and I would meet at Butch’s house to pick him up (all four of us lived within a few blocks of each other), and then the three of us would walk the short block on the same street to pick up Mike, before we all walked the mile or so to school. I won’t regale you with stories like it was uphill both ways with terrible weather…but it was!  Although we had some classes together, most of the bonding came when we were hanging out at school during breaks, hanging out after school, hanging out on weekends; let’s just say there was a great deal of “hanging out.”

We played and watched a variety of sports together – football, baseball, hockey – and we rode our bicycles everywhere. We would have hockey tournaments using one of those old stationary-player hockey games – two at a time, the winner talking on the next in line. These games were always in Mike’s basement, and I remember that we decided to play with a marble instead of the little plastic puck, which was fine until Mike’s parents redid the walls down there with this very nice wood paneling. There was this tendency for the marble to get stuck between two of the metal players on the board, and when it finally moved due to excessive force by one of us, the marble would take off like a rocket, bouncing off the new wood walls, leaving these round indentations, which we of course we did not notice. It didn’t take long for Mike’s mom to notice them. . .busted. Come to think of it, there were many memorable events that took place in Mike’s basement; the very first time we all heard Led Zeppelins’ “Stairway to Heaven” comes to mind!

In the ensuing years after high school, our friendship remained strong, even though we were no longer seeing each other every day for those walks to and from school. Some of us still played sports together, there were weekly poker games in Mike’s basement yet again, canoe trips, camping, skiing, cars, and other “recreational” activities. There were girlfriends, jobs, careers, weddings, children, divorces, loss, stepchildren, grandchildren, step grandchildren, relocation (myself in 1983, and again in 2005), and all the other things that transpire in one’s life, and that tend to make relationships and friendships become fond memories of years gone by. Not us. While all of the above certainly took place in all our lives, after 61 years, we can still get together on a Zoom call (as we will for Butch’s birthday on March 2^nd), and after five minutes, it feels like we are back in Mike’s basement playing dealer’s choice and chastising one another for yet another ridiculous poker game with far too many cards that are wild!

Steve, Mike, Butch and I are very different people, bound together by our place in time, shared experiences, and an acceptance of each other for who we were, who we became, and who we are. And although we all have had very different careers, some more than others, there is one thing that we all have done either as our primary job or as an offshoot of a job, and that is teach. Butch was a high school teacher for many years, Mike has taught in his profession of dentistry, Steve has taught, and in fact is still teaching in the field of marketing, and I went back to school after a long absence, which eventually morphed into becoming a professor and then a high school English teacher after relocating to the US. This could be explained away as pure coincidence, but I have never put much stock into that word. For me, it is our shared experience of giving something of ourselves back to others. Although I can only speak for myself, I have a strong suspicion the others would agree that teaching has enriched my/our lives in so many ways, and hopefully it has also enriched the lives of the many students who dutifully listened to what I/we had to say. Of course, learning is a two way street, and a big part of my enrichment was what I learned from my students.

And now for the pendant pictured at the top. At some point in our teen years, we decided that we wanted something to “commemorate” our friendship. I cannot remember if one of us came up with the design, but it was our collective idea to have something made with our names and our birthdates. My father was in the jewelry business at the time, so I asked him if he knew anyone who could make something like that for us in sterling silver. Several weeks later, the pendants arrived. Looking back at this now, I wonder if we were thinking that a friendship like the one we had (still have) was going to be very different once we started going our own ways, and that the pendant would serve as a reminder of those years, a keepsake that would forever bond us together. While the sentiment, and perhaps the intended symbolism behind the pendant are certainly valid, as it turns out, it was not really needed. Because after all these years, we still have each other’s backs!

The last time the four of us were together in the same place was in Montreal in 2018 for our 50^th high school reunion. Mike was on the organizing committee, and although it was a trek for me living in Los Angeles, there was no way I was not going to be there. It was also, for me, a nice break from pondering the question, “Now what?”, as I had retired earlier that year. For the three of them, it was reconnecting with people who had perhaps disappeared from their daily lives, although they all still lived in the same city. For me, who left Montreal in 1983, with the exception of my three buddies, I hadn’t seen most of the attendees in at least 50 years. The reunion was everything I hoped it would  be, and more.

Mike, as it turns out, had a surprise for us at the reunion, and he asked us to all come over to his place, the basement of course, at some point that weekend. The surprise…A refurbished hockey game so we could pick up where we left off!

I am happy to report that there were no wooden paneled walls damaged in this reenactment of Hockey Night in Canada!

Los Angeles 2024