In high school, I thought of Ellen Fiur as my best friend. Ellen was brilliant, funny, and kind, all traits we shared and ones I valued. We both wrote for the school newspaper and played together in band and orchestra. When we graduated, she was the class salutatorian, the person with the second highest grade point average in a class of 400+ students. She would go on to get an undergraduate degree from Brandeis, then a Master’s degree in Education from Harvard. Today, many schools have done away with the tradition of honoring the highest achievers of academic excellence, the valedictorians and salutatorians have faded into obscurity, folding to the demands of the “participation trophy”generations. I see the rationale behind this downplay of IQ and it’s accomplishments, but I think “less is not more.’
Perhaps we need to celebrate more people for more reasons, for many more of the things people do, and in some cases, for things they don’t do. As I started to explore this notion, I realized something about “best friends.” I’ve had so many I’ve so named in my lifetime. Were they all, like Ellen, brilliant, funny, and kind? Perhaps they were, but my affections were often captured by so many fascinating nuances, so many variations on those themes. Among my best friends, I have loved people with amazing EQ’s, people whose special traits were found along the emotional spectrum. I have revered the loyal, the dependable, those with uncommon “common sense.” I have delighted in special friends with a most welcome “sense of fun,” those with a steady nature, those with “follow through,” and even persons with the ability to be “laid back,” happily ordinary in a society of over-achievers. I’ve come to the awareness that often, a “best friend” is someone who while he or she might be “brilliant, funny, and kind,” is mostly one in whose company one feels fully human and fully accepted, a valuable “work in process.” A best friend lets you know, like Mr. Rogers always did–“I love you just the way you are.” I pray that I have been that kind of friend to all my “besties” throughout a lifetime of love.