I heard from or about 3 of my 4 best friends from my life over the past months of the age of Covid. Being honest, I think being a faithful and good friend has never been a strong point of mine. Even with family, I reach a point where I just move on and am somewhat absent of a need to spend time – even when I know it’s what they want from me. I’m married but haven’t had that sense with my spouse yet – beyond what I think is normal for people who can crowd each other a bit.

There are 4 people who I wold have counted at some point in my life to have been a best friend – David, Robert, Brandt, and Mike. I’ve known David since maybe 2nd Grade in Texas and by the strangest coincidence we met again in high school in Virginia and hung out quite a bit. He’s in North Carolina and I hear from him at odd occasions, but not regularly. But when we  do connect, it’s clear we still have a good feeling of friendship.

In high school, particularly in my last two years, Mike was a very close friend of mine. By the time summer after high school ended, for whatever reason, he really grated on me and that relationship soured – an expression of my feeling toward him than the other way around I think. We both knew Brandt from high school. Brandt was my crazy drink-like-a-fish friend in the first couple years of College. A truly weird artist guy who ate up the fraternity life. Starting out as a strange nerdy guy, the frat life and his outsize personality made him a social figure. As my life moved onto something more solitary and I soured on fraternity life, we drifted apart. My life moved onto my passion for research – his life continued apace in a very parochial sense, very tied to the undergraduate friends we both knew. He was successful and life continued as a fraternity party; but he was a good friend to those who knew him. I say ‘was’ because he died just about a week before the Covid shutdown. He has a second wife with one child, around 8 I think. I feel awful for them and for us. I reached out to Mike a month later to let him know. He had already been told by Carol – a mutual friend and girlfriend of both of ours and another story.

Robert, the best man at my wedding, is the last of the quad. We shared a passion for physics since undergraduate, though we had actually met in high school in a trip to the Naval Research Laboratory. I’m not sure how that happened since we went to different high schools. Robert is a truly bright and socially comfortable person. Much better than me at focusing on the academic pursuits – not distracted by sins of the flesh as I am. But career-wise in academic physics, partly through luck, partly through who we are, I eventually had more success. In the end though, he managed to carve out a career that has let him remain in academia. I did not. Although not there now, we last had an overlapping life in Ann Arbor where I met my spouse. His family and mine spent a fair amount of time together. Shortly after I got married, he and his wife had a very ugly divorce. She wanted it and he did not. We remained close, possibly closer, to his wife. I found myself insensitive to his plight and feel like I was something of a jerk about it. In the end, I think that put a bit of coldness on our relationship. He’s in Utah now and we still talk, maybe once a year. He’ll always land on his feet but I never did quite enough as a friend for him as I should have. I think that was true about all of my friends.