In friends meeting

Sideshow Bob, is that you?

Ignore my outrageous man hands, please, and concentrate instead on the lovely ring I’m sporting. My dear friend Sophie gave it to me my first night here: It’s three rings in one, and it bears an inscription related to my 21st. (It’s not my birthday. Sophie and I fell shamelessly out of regular gift-giving habits during our respective travels these recent years.) It’s perfect because through high school, I was lucky enough to have two best friends — and not in the usual in-case-one-breaks-down catty girl sense, either.

Bec, Sophie and I were a stable, close triad from ages 13-18. We were a debating team (two of us went to nationals in sixth form), a fashion design clearinghouse, a Young Enterprise business of massive success, a trio of upwardly mobile academics who did two or three subjects apiece one or two years ahead, and a tea drinkers anonymous group with a rolling series of daily scheduled meetings. (We each take it strong with milk and 1.5 sugars, thanks.)

They were always eminently sensible friends, encouraging of good judgment, independent-spirited, and loving without peer. They generally tried with all their hearts to talk me out of all the bad decisions I made as a teenager, but never failed to understand why I made them anyway. Sophie taught me taste in music and new ways to imagine pants and how to cultivate older friends. Bec taught me to hold my own in English and that real life isn’t all seriousness. Many women remember adolescence as a period of drastic friendship instability, of fortunes that rose and fell with a hair flick and a knowing look. I don’t: I remember knowing only that while I didn’t have many friends, I had precisely as many as I needed, and that furthermore they seemed to need me back. The last New Year’s I particularly enjoyed was the one five years ago we spent just the three of us on Sumner beach with a bottle of champagne.

In some ways you miss your friends more than you miss your family, when you spend a lot of time away from home, because the family bond is definite and settled. There is the certainty of dates like Christmas, and the formality of their names on “in case of emergency please contact” forms. Family relationships, for all their potential for strife, are never at risk of simple attrition. But friends lose touch all the time.

It gives me great satisfaction to know that, having survived through years of half-written letters (upon my arrival, I gave Sophie a bundle of aborted missives dating back to one I’d started the Northern summer of 2004), birthday phonecalls only when we remembered, and silent lapses that swallowed whole seasons, ours are bonds that seem likely to endure for life. A ring with three bands seems like a perfect synecdoche for us.

Now if only we could tempt Bec back from her current Canadian moonbeam-spotting adventure, then we’d really be set.