A Toast to Friends

Families get a lot of press this time of year. People are urged to make amends, make phone calls, make food, and make nice. Get together with your family in the winter holiday season, and remember all the good times. Before I go too far with this, let me say that I’ve got nothing against families. I’m a long way from mine, though. When Christmas comes around, much as I miss them, I have to celebrate without Mom and Dad, Jenny and Kate. At the same time, most of my friends are headed off in a billion different directions to spend time with brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers. So I’m left with plenty of time to think about families.

And here I’d like to raise a cheer for our “other families”—not our birth families, but our life families, the folks we spend all of the rest of the year with but who don’t really get credit for being family. I’m lucky because I have a big life family. In fact, it’s an odd kind of extended family. My oldest and closest friend, Lloyd, is also family to people I work with, people I surf with, and people I know in a different context.

According to tradition, family members are the ones who remain steadfast, while friends come and go. “Oh, that’s too bad,” people say. “It must be hard not to be around your family.” Yes, it is hard to have so little contact with my birth family, but it’s not at all hard to know that if I ever need a ride to a meeting, my friend Summer will immediately drop whatever she is doing and come swoop me up. If I’m struggling with what to do about a problem in my writing or in my 12-step work, I immediately call Scotty, Paul, or Leroy, and I know they’ll meet me and give me their best advice.