THE BEGINNING AND END OF FRIENDS

When you’re a child, friends are the most important people in the world to you, aside from your family. You can always take your family for granted because they are contractually obligated genetically to, at least, put up with you.

But everyone else is up for grabs. Other kids can like or loathe you based on your personality, a scary thought indeed. You can’t be your usual whiney little self like you are with your family. You have to be fun and loyal to make and keep friends.

When you start school the more friends the better to keep you from being beaten up by the bullies. If you can center yourself inside a phalanx of friends, then no one can get to you, so you and your lunch money are safe.

You need friends to find out what homework was assigned that you missed while joking around in class. You need friends to study with, in between pick-up football games and wrestling free-for-alls, if you’re a boy. If you’re a girl I guess you study, in between doing each other’s hair and toenails. I don’t have a clue here really.

You need friends to help you figure out the opposite sex, based on their bad experiences. However, once they turn to the dark and cuddly side, it’s too late because they don’t have any time left for you away from their beloved. It’s the break away jump shot of love. Three is one too many for a couple.

Then if your best friend marries, you have to wait till the glow dims and the bare bulb of reality hits him smack in the face, and he wants to talk to you about the trials and tribulations of marriage. Then you’re buddies again till the babies come. Once you marry, you can reconnect then. If you divorce later, all in-law friends are subject to change to enemies.

Making friends is all a matter of timing. You make friends the most when you’re alone and stuck in the same situation because everyone needs you too. It’s a matter of mass survival.

So you start off with your playground pals in grade school. This is a very democratic dynamic based solely on whoever’s friendly with you becomes you new best friend. The weeding out process starts in high school when social status and the cool quotient kick in.

Sometimes your grade school friends embarrass you, because they’re not as cool as your new high school friends, so you cruelly move on. Being not so cool yourself doesn’t matter, as long as your close friends are considered cool. That’s coolness by association.

If you go on to college, your new friends can come from anywhere. Your friendships broaden as you study to become a teacher, a doctor or a manager trainee. Friendships can become snootier based on parents’ income and your academics. New friendships can help you get future jobs, spouses and free meals after graduation when you visit them.

If you move on into the military and aren’t married, then it’s almost like first grade again as you’re all in the same boat or barracks. You can be sent anywhere to do manly things, even if you’re a woman. Separated from your home and family, your friends are all you have. But they’re the hardest to hold on to after you leave. Letters go unanswered, phone numbers get lost, visits are cancelled and e-mails just forward jokes till these friendships dry up too.

At work, friends are forced on you desk to desk, office to office or on the assembly line. It’s a series of fluctuating friendships, depending on outbursts and hurt feelings, until you retire. Even though you plan to keep in touch, without work in common, that fades with time, distance and other interests. At the end, you return to your family as friends and, as you lose friends throughout life, you could be reduced to watching “Friends” reruns so that you can again visit friends who aren’t related to you.

Finally, if you make it to a nursing home, you may not even realize who your roommate is as your mind downloads your childhood memories to keep you company with your first friends, mommy and daddy. Which makes you square with the circle of life.