I also felt like I was re-meeting Andy, like he was a completely new person than the one I have known all my life. Gone was the Andy who lived for the sole purpose of dating and pleasing his girlfriend. Gone was the high school Andy, who did as little work as possible while achieving the best possible return. Gone was the skinny, bony, boyish Andy I remember. Instead, I encountered a tall, conscientious young man who is searching for direction in his life. This is not to say he has “lost his way”—as so many of our other friends have—but, rather, he is thinking hard about his current pursuits and where they will lead him.
Any outsider would say that he is barreling 100mph toward success, with his multiple lab jobs, prestigious fellowships, graduate classes, and hospital work. Yet, instead of panicking about “needing to do more” (as success often breeds the demand for more success), he is contemplating whether or not these are all things he truly loves to do. He wants to be happy, and he is trying to find out how.
Andy has always been someone I have respected. In high school, we always competed for the best grades, but where I worked hard to land the grades and “beat him,” he just did whatever amount of work he felt like doing and watched the grades play out as they would. Luckily for him, his genius got him through, and each of us “won” about half of the time. If my class had had a valedictorian, it would be hard to say who would have received that status.
Nevertheless, I did not just respect Andy for his intellect. I have met many smart people both in high school and college, yet few of them impressed me as much as Andy did. Andy thought about life. He did not take people or events at face-value, and he was always looking to get more out of every experience. I never spoke to anyone as frankly and searchingly about love, happiness, or spirituality as I did to him during our years in high school.
For a time, it seemed he had lost this desire to “dig deep.” We no longer had much to say to one another once he got a girlfriend, and we fell out of touch, only seeing each other occasionally in the summer, both busy with our lives. When he and his girlfriend broke up, I e-mailed him, and we wrote back and forth a few times. Then, last night, I had a bit of spare time, so I called him up. I drove down to Oakland to see his new apartment (which, although he has been living there since February, was at least new to me), and we went for coffee. (Well, he got coffee. I got apple juice.) Then, we went on a walk around Oakland, ending up in a park for a while, before returning and sitting on the porch of his apartment. “It’s the little things that matter,” he told me at one point, lurching away from a spinny-contraption in the park.
And he is right: it is the little things, and I noticed all of them that night. I noticed how he looked older—not old in a worn-out way, but more mature. He has filled out since I last saw him, and he now wears a scruffy, unshaven look naturally, without looking like a boy trying to pretend to be a man. He paid for my apple juice—a small gesture, but one I appreciated more than he could possibly understand. I noticed how he thought about what he wanted to say before beginning to speak, looking into a space by the back of my head as he gathered my thoughts. I noticed how frankly he looked at me as I spoke, how he asked questions and seemed to really want to know the answers. I noticed how he lit cigarettes casually on the porch, and how I didn’t really mind anymore.
All of these things are important. They matter. We are growing, and time spent apart only emphasizes even more strongly how much and in what ways.
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