Best Friends

I used to think that you could only have one best friend.  Somehow the term implies exclusivity.  Only one person can be the best baseball player or the best student.  When such things can be quantified and laid out on paper, it’s easy to say who is best. 

If you have more than one best friend at a time, it might be akin to going out with two people at once, or something even more uncomfortable.

I just finished a ten-day trip to Ireland with twenty three other people.  As I’ve been recounting the trip and all its richness, it struck me.  Four of the people on this trip are people I consider my best friend.  How can this be?

My wife Betsy is my best friend.  She is everything I ever hoped for in a spouse and life partner.  She is funny, smart, loyal, a better athlete than me, a great parent to our children, outgoing, fun to be around.  And is she ever cute!  I once heard someone say that you should marry carefully, because your spouse becomes your room mate for life.  Marrying Betsy was the single best decision I ever made.

Doug Morgan is my best friend.  He and I have a lot in common, as we went to public high schools in Ohio, went to Ivy League colleges, worked in the two biggest cities in this country, and then chose to return home to Ohio to raise our families.  We play music together in a band called “Doug Morgan and the Pep Boys (Manny, Moe and Jim.)”  We play golf together.  We are on at least five different boards together.  I often say that my social life revolves around two people: my wife, and Doug Morgan.  Doug and I have talked about moving together in retirement to live near each other, not in Florida or Arizona, but in a small college town someplace in Ohio.  Doug brings out the best in people.

Tom Ruegger is my best friend.  We have known each other since 1972, our freshman year together at Dartmouth College.   We’ve seen each other through the best and worst of times.  I was best man in his wedding in 1979.  He and I shared two apartments in Los Angeles during our scuffling days after college, and he was my biggest fan when I was trying to make it in the music business.  He has inspired me with his creativity and amazed me with his capacity for insight, humor and hard work.

Dan Wright is my best friend.  If I had not visited Dan at Dartmouth College one night in the fall of 1971, I might have gone instead to Williams College, where I had been all but promised early admission by the director there.  Instead, I followed Dan to Dartmouth in the fall of 1972.  He was my first “roadie” when I played the college student union circuit, and we had that memorable first trip to Ireland in the summer of 1987.  When I asked Betsy to marry me, I did not have to think twice about who I’d ask to be my best man.  It was Dan, hands down.  When I went off to have my hips replaced in 2001, I told Dan things I could not tell Betsy in case I did not come back.  That’s a best friend.

There are several other friends I’d put in this best friend category, and I’ll save that for another post, as they were not on this recent Ireland trip.  In some ways, this trip resembled the college experience, with the pleasant addition of wives and credit cards.

 All of my life I’ve felt that I’ve done things well and could have done them better.  In this category I include school, writing and performing songs, working in the banking industry, even being a husband, son, brother and father.  The one thing I could not have done better is to be surrounded by best friends.