First Friends

From victims of geography to a brotherhood of time and place

What in the heck do I have in common with this guy?

Everything… right down to the bone.

Derrick Marshall was/is one of my first friends. He recently wrote from Columbia where he lives and works, “Just sitting here trying to figure out time frames in my life when it just popped into my head .. my old friend John Wesley Chisholm .. its been 58 years since we first met .. its simply amazing to have someone still in your life after all this time .. a friend for all time .. successful .. proud to watch you still climbing”

It’s a thoughtful remembrance from the most interesting of men - brilliant, creative, musical, curious and capable, loving, a hard-working iconoclast, and, I suppose (rightfully) to some… pretty scary.

And that inspired me to wonder about first friends.

When there’s nothing in common but geography

There’s something powerful about the friendships we make in the earliest years of our lives. These aren't the curated, social media-ready connections formed in adulthood, but the messy, organic bonds forged by proximity, curiosity, and, often, sheer mischief. These are the "geographic friends"—those whose paths crossed ours simply because we shared a neighborhood, a lake, a set of woods, or a school bus route. They were the first to know us before we knew ourselves, and over time, they can become the truest mirrors of who we are.

Growing up in Waverley, Nova Scotia, in the 1960s and '70s, I was part of a cohort of about two dozen kids, bound not by city streets and playgrounds, but by forests, water, and the siren of adventure. Then called home at supper by a clatter of gongs, cowbells, whistles, and shouts that included our middle names.

This wasn’t the digital-first, safety-first world of today. It was rougher, rawer, and full of freedom - for better and much worse. We were baby boomers at the tail end of the post-war era, running wild in the golden hour before technology reshaped our childhoods. The woods and waters framed our days, and the village was our boundary—but it was more than a boundary; it was our entire universe.

There he is, second from the right with me in the middle.

We had older cohorts to look up to, too. They were even wilder ones, the ones who formed bands like April Wine and lived out the rebellious freedom we only glimpsed. Fights, fun, and misadventure were par for the course. The ethos of the time was raw freedom, risk, and importantly, a bit of violence. It shaped us.

In truth, by today’s standards, we were animals and criminals running wild. Creative destruction was the main game. We would have been diagnosed with any number of pathologies and diseases today, but back then they just called us kids.

And then half a century went by

My grandmother used to chord her old piano forte and sing songs that would have been old even when she was a girl. She sang them all cheerfully, but I can see now there was more to it.

She liked to sing Ben Bolt, a song about first friends

by Dr. Thomas Dunn and Nelson Kneass, 1848

Oh don't you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt
Sweet Alice whose hair was so brown
Who wept with delight at the sight of your smile
And trembled with fear at your frown.

2. In the old church yard in the valley, Ben Bolt
In a corner obscure and alone
They have fitted a slab of granite so gray
And sweet Alice lies under the stone.

3. Under the hickory tree, Ben Bolt
That stood at the top of the hill
Together we've laid in the noonday shade
And listened to Appleton's mill.

4. The mill wheel has fallen to pieces, Ben Bolt
The rafters have tumbled in
And a quiet that crawls 'round the walls as you gaze
Has followed the olden din.

5. And don't you remember the school, Ben Bolt
With the master so cruel and grim
And the shaded nook by the running brook
Where the children went to swim.

6. Grass grows on the master's grave, Ben Bolt
The spring of the brook is dry
And of all the boys who were schoolmates then
There are only you and I.

Fast forward to now, past 60 years old, and I know all the characters in this song as she must have - the digital age feels like a universe apart from the one we grew up in, but things are just the same. The friends we made back then—the ones you might not have chosen if given an adult's discerning taste - or even common sense - but who were there because of geography—are the ones who still somehow "get it." There's something to be said for this connection to the past, to a place, to shared risks and mischief. It’s not always the ones you were closest to then who stay with you, but the ones whose shared history resonates loudest with your own.

Over the years, many of those first friends have drifted into the ether, lost to time, despair, and misadventure. Too many, I think, have passed away compared to normal, but what do I know about normal? And yet, a few, not necessarily the ones who were your best friends then, remain in the mix. Time changes how it all seems and what it means. They are the ones who ride motorcycles, play music, or carry on those shared experiences of childhood at the lake. They are the ones who understand the thrill of exploring those old gold mines or the echo of beaver engines on a still morning, as the mist rose over Lake William. It's the shared memories of violence, of freedom, and the sense of wonder that lingers.

Life Compression

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things" (I Corinthians 13:11). The apostle Paul's admonition to believers is to put away childish things. Childish speaking, childish thinking, and childish reasonings are to be put away.

Some of us put away childish things. We crossed over almost to another dimension of life. And the door was locked and bolted behind us.

But I’m going to ask you to really open yourself up to the idea of looking through that door and remembering those childish things in their monstrous glory.

We all imagine we’re free. And we mostly imagine we’re more free now than people in the past. But I’ve got enough timeline now to know it’s not true. Our lives, and certainly the lives of children are more compressed now. There are far fewer choices and a much narrower range of possibilities. Lost in the ancient past before light and power and transportation it’s hard for us to know. The light was a lot lighter. Dark was darker. Quiet was a lot quieter. Far away was a lot closer. And within people, the expressions of happy, sad, mad, bad, and glad were so much more extreme to the point we would think insane. And just 50 years ago it was only a little different.

The thing that seems to me the most compressed over my lifetime since childhood is violence. As daughter Dorothy turns 8 she’s asking a lot of questions and that’s the area I find hardest to explain. Violence was a regular part of our everyday lives in SO many ways that were just totally normal. There’s no way I could count the number of times I had been kicked, punched, beaten, and humiliated by the time I was her age. By teachers, neighbours, big kids, strangers, and friends. It was just part of it. They had their reasons. And things got a lot worse from there.

Later, by the late 70’s, we picked up somewhere the notion of “bullies” and I took that framing to heart. That I was the victim of bullies. I carried that for a long time, though that wouldn’t describe half the awful stuff that happened. But I don’t see it that way now. I am where I am because of all that. Because of those experiences. I’m resilient - a new framing term - because I learned how to put broken things back together again, to take a punishment, to take a punch, and to keep going. It’s no fun when life is hard as an adult, when loved ones suffer, when there are money worries, when there are people coming against you, when you get sick or hurt, lose your job or your business struggles. But it’s nothing compared to getting kicked to the ground, or the ice, or the ditch, and beaten and getting up swiping the blood off, and even if you did yell “Somebody get my Mom” you still pulled things together mostly yourself, and got back out there the next day; surprisingly often weaving in and out of fun and friendship with the same people who kicked you half to death.

Very few people like getting punched in the face. And I believe just as few get joy out of punching people. But neither bothers me as much as it would bother a kid today because I’ve been through the experiences of what I’ll shorthand call ‘everyday violence’. It’s complicated. No one would wish for more violence in the world, in the home, school, workplace, or play. But I think many of us have the feeling that our bubble-wrapped kids have lost something of what it is to be human and free. They are the first generation in history, in the world, to collectively live with this much peace for so long and it’ll be interesting to see what it all means and how it turns out after so many of us longed for it for so long.

A Redemption Song

From the days when marbles was a contact sport and we spent an astonishing amount time in half-frozen ditches, we graduated to be perverts and petty criminals, some more than others, but none I can recall from our little group with truly clean hands.

Maybe most inexplicable today was the connection between sex and violence. Two words that were once companions that you never hear together now. This mingling created a blurred line between these primal forces, forming a rougher, less compartmentalized experience of childhood than what is typical in modern, more shielded contexts.

These relationships we had, so unchosen and unfiltered, offer us a perspective on our own lives that is harder to come by elsewhere. The memories we built together were rough and raw, but real. In a way, our childhood friendships were a mirror of the era—a time before the safety nets of the modern world wrapped themselves around us.

In the world of men, the idea of brotherhood often comes up, I’m surprised how much I hear the call Bruuu these days, but there’s something primal about the brotherhood of first friends. You weren’t bound by choice or taste or compatibility. You were bound by time, place, and the reckless freedom of youth. That bond, while it may fade for some, never truly breaks for others.

These old friends don’t ask for explanations. They know the roots of your dumb story because, in many ways, it’s their dumb story too. They were there in the trenches, in the woods, on the ice, or around the campfire. And while the years may pull you in different directions, when you come together, it's as if the intervening decades dissolve. Shared memories and experiences act as the great equalizers, grounding you in a way that no adult friendship can replicate. And for a few, and I’ll include myself, we have some sort of redemption story. We somehow got out of that criminal chaos and graduated into what I suppose would be considered the normal world of modern adults.

I often wonder if there’s anyone left back there. If I could drive far enough out of town to find in the rural places kids who still wore workboots with steel toes not vocationally but with the hope they’d get to kick the shit out of someone. Or maybe that world is still there, hidden in plain sight such that our adult eyes can’t see, in the same way it appeared my parents couldn’t see or understand any more than the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon.

First friends are the foundation stones of your personal history. They remind you of the risks you took, the places you explored, and the things you survived. The passage of time only sharpens the contours of those relationships, turning them into something more like legend.

So, to the men out there feeling the tug of nostalgia or the bite of time, remember those first friends. Reach out to them. You don’t need to write it all out in words. That’s not the language we shared. Don’t imagine it’s going to be awesome though. There are so many dimensions to time, who knows where those people from the past stand now. They may not all be around anymore, and the ones who are might surprise you. After all, they knew you when your world was framed by woods and waters, not by Wi-Fi and pixels. They knew you when the adventure was everything and the stakes felt as high as the tree you climbed and fell from.

In a world that seems to move faster and faster, the simplicity and depth of these old connections remind us that some things—like shared wonder and brotherhood—are timeless and real. Maybe our connections to first friends from that secret and forgotten world connect us to all the people past.

The Ancient Mysteries

You might consider stopping here… because it’s gonna get weird. But… If you made it this far, I’m going to ask you to come on a spiritual journey with me. I’m going to share a passage from an ancient book called THE MEANING OF MASONRY. I am inclined toward the idea that, until fairly recent times this kind of first friends and childhood I’ve been describing is the very real echos of the ancient mysteries, rites, and history of the whole human race repeated in our infancy as plainly as our facial features are repeated from our parents and those who went before them.

The History of the Soul

”We of today pride ourselves upon being wiser and more advanced than primitive humanity. We assume that our ancestors lived in moral benightedness out of which we have since gradually emerged into comparative light. All the evidence, however, negatives these suppositions. It indicates that primitive man, however childish and intellectually undeveloped according to modern standards, was spiritually conscious and psychically perceptive to a degree undreamed of by the modern mind, and that it is ourselves who, for all our cleverness and intellectual development in temporal matters, are nevertheless plunged in darkness and ignorance about our own nature, the invisible world around us, and the eternal spiritual verities.

In all Scriptures and cosmologies the tradition is universal of a "Golden Age," an age of comparative innocence, wisdom and spirituality, in which racial unity and individual happiness and enlightenment prevailed; in which there was that open vision for want of which a people perisheth, but in virtue of which men were once in conscious conversation with the unseen world and were shepherded, taught and guided by the "gods" or discarnate superintendents of the infant race, who imparted to them the sure and indefeasible principles upon which their spiritual welfare and evolution depended.

The tradition is also universal of the collective soul of the human race having sustained a "fall," a moral declension from its true path of life and evolution, which has severed it almost entirely from its creative source, and which, as the ages advanced, has involved its sinking more and more deeply into physical conditions, its splitting up from a unity employing a single language into a diversity of conflicting races of different speeches and degrees of moral advancement, accompanied by a progressive densification of the material body and a corresponding darkening of the mind and atrophy of the spiritual consciousness.

To some who read this the statement will probably be rejected as fabulous and incredible. The supposition of a "fall of man" is nowadays an unpopular doctrine, rejected by many who contend that everything points rather to a rise of man, yet who fail to reflect that logically a rise necessarily involves an antecedent fall from which a rise becomes possible.”

We got a long way to go yet

I was going to wrap this up by naming some names and telling some “whatever happened to stories” like they sometimes do at the end of teen sex comedy movies, themselves an artifact of this past, but I’ll leave it for another day because our race isn’t yet run. We’re going to live longer and live healthier longer than any generation in history. There are lots of good times and interesting things out ahead to talk about rather than the sights and sounds of memory lane. It’s just worth stopping for a minute to remember why our first friends are crucially important to us.

Got a first friends story to share?