I made some friends

I have been blessed with more than my fair share of lifelong friendships. When I married my wife, I wrote vows about how I would try to emulate my closest friends as a husband. That was twelve years ago. Some of them I've known since I was eight. I chat with all of them almost every day.

I have a son who I'm similar to in a lot of ways. We both like going deep on our interests. A lot of our interests overlap. I feel like I can read his mind sometimes.

But, one area where we are not alike is that he does not yet have the friendships that have been so important in my life. Part of that is that when I was his age I had only ever been in one school. He's gone to three.

Another part is that while we share so many similarities, this is one of our differences. He's not always sure how to enter into a conversation with new people. And this has been especially hard for me to observe because he's so cool and funny. It makes me think that he's not always comfortable in his own skin. That's not something I experienced when I was his age.

Last summer we sent him to a sleep-away camp for a week. I remember putting my hands on his head, pressing my forehead against his, and saying, you've got this, when we dropped him off.

Maybe I was telling that to myself.

He did not have the best time. The camp even called us to say that he was being super quiet and they were a little concerned.

When he returned he told me, I did not make a single friend.

Heartbreaking.

Not one to quit on camp, I spent the past year regaling him with stories from my experience as a camper. There was the time we smuggled an N64 and a TV into camp to play GoldenEye late into the night. And that's to say nothing about the trap door we chiseled into the back of our bunk as if we were reenacting The Shawshank Redemption in order to give ourselves a secret passage in and out.

All of this happened with a lot of the friends that I've known for over thirty years. And it was compelling enough to make him rethink his initial hesitancy to return to camp.

He agreed to another summer.

Given how the last summer went, I was a bit nervous. But, he's also grown a lot. And he seemed genuinely excited about the prospect.

When the drop-off day came, he was not himself. He refused to talk to anyone waiting for the bus in spite of my pleading to introduce him. I know how to help you make friends!

He insisted, I have a plan.

To his credit, when the bus door opened, he ran up the steps with hardly another word.

Two weeks later, my wife picked him up and I got to talk to him on the phone. The first thing he said to me after, Hi, Dad, was:

I made some friends.