Boston: I’m giving thanks for old friends today [ Dallas Morning News ]

The familiar lines of a few literary sages have inspired my reconnection to old friends recently. This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for that.

In his poem “Little Gidding,” T.S. Eliot invited me to consider the circle of life and old friendships made new:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

In sync with Eliot on the subject, writer Cynthia Ozick weighed in:

What we remember from childhood we remember forever —

Permanent ghosts stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

Novelist Eudora Welty’s words put icing on the cake:

Setting out in this world, a child feels so indelible. He only comes to find out later that it’s all the others along his way who are making themselves indelible to him.

Finally, a passage from Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men led me home:

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he hasn’t the slightest concern with calculating his interest or your virtue.

Assembling all these thoughts together on this special day, I’m giving thanks for one of life’s great treasures: friends who ran with me in the past, and still walk with me in the present.

Bonding with them in the last decade, long after our youthful paths separated, has brought me an abundance of good times and thoughtful discussions. I’ve found that my friends who were smart, good-natured and fun way back in our salad days have managed to retain those same traits up through today.

The good news is that locating the “friends of your youth” isn’t hard these days, thanks to the internet.

Houston grade school buddies Mike Gregory and Bill Monroe have recently crossed my path thanks to the help of mutual friends. Since I didn’t have an older brother, Mike and Bill were my big brother figures. They were two years older and lived in my neighborhood in the early 1960s. Since my dad had no interest in athletics, they were the ones who taught me how to play sports.

We’ve now caught up with each other’s activities over the last half century, and since we’re all alumni of the University of Texas, we’re looking forward to an Austin reunion in February that will surely involve lots of embellished storytelling as well as seeing a Longhorn basketball game.

My fellow Corpus Christi junior high student council officers Larry Wheeler and Bill Transier connected with me through LinkedIn. Since then, we’ve gathered for terrific dinners with our wives and been out to see Texas Rangers games at Globe Life Field.

My best high school buddies in Connecticut — Randy and Lauriston Avery, Dave Wexler, Tripp Blair, Josh Libresco and Dave Harrison — all now live in different states. Yet in recent years we’ve stayed in close touch and done our best to get together when we find ourselves in the same part of the country.

College friends Marvin Blum and Reid Wilson joined me at UT Law School in the mid-1970s, and there we encountered several other Type A fun-loving guys. In recent years, we’ve named our merry band of 21 lawyers “the Canoe Brothers,” and we communicate constantly, discussing politics, sports and life. We also get together en banc at least three times a year for canoeing on the Guadalupe River, fishing off the coast of Galveston, hiking in Colorado, or watching football while stuffing ourselves with gourmet food prepared by our host David Smith at his Nashville home.

Today, besides thanking God for my family, health and employment, I’m sending up prayers of gratitude for the friends of my youth. Then and now, they are real friends, as Robert Penn Warren described them:

He doesn’t give a damn, for the moment, about Getting Ahead or Needs Must Admiring the Best, the two official criteria in adult friendships, and when the boring stranger appears, he puts out his hand and smiles (not really seeing your face) and speaks your name (which doesn’t really belong to your face), saying, “Well, Jack, damned glad you came, come on in, boy!”

The reward for keeping such friendships? The Irish poet William Butler Yeats provides the answer:

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,

And say my glory was I had such friends.