One of my former teachers used to say, “Friends are like waiters in a restaurant. They are there when you need them, then they move on.” Looking back on my life, short as it has been, I see the truth in this statement. People change, life takes you in different directions, and you grow apart and find new people. However true this might be in most cases, it’s not true in all cases. Some friendships manage to endure from one stage of life to another across the years.

I consider myself fortunate to have one of these friendships, going on about 15 years now, most of my scant 20 years of life. The person whose friendship I’ve enjoyed for so long is the ever interesting, creative spectacular Adam Weidman. Adam and I, we go way back, all the way back to kindergarten in fact. We’ve been together throughout the American education system from elementary school to high school and everything in between. We even did Cub Scouts together as boys.

Looking back, I see that our friendship is rather odd. We are very different people in our tastes and near opposite personalities. He’s extroverted, self-assured, and artistic, whereas I’m much more introverted, self-conscious, and academic. Despite these seemingly vast differences, we have many similarities. We both have similar cultural tastes and have little trouble going against the grain of popular opinion. Its very much a yin-yang dynamic and yet it works so well.

Last week Adam came up on his spring break to see San Francisco. We had a marvelous time seeing the city, visiting the Haight, going record shopping, seeing SFMOMA and the Disney family museum, and even hanging out in a jazz club downtown. I doubt I would be able to convince most of my friends, barring a few exceptional individuals, to do one of these things, let alone all of them. Adam is probably one of the few friends that indulges in the quirkier sides of my personality and acquiesces to my more eccentric tastes without subjecting me to intense teasing (just regular amounts of teasing). Likewise, I do much of the same for him. That’s probably the best thing about our friendship, we just get each other. Sure, we may think something is a little odd or weird, but we roll with it and don’t raise a fuss about it.

Having a friend for over 15 years creates a much different dynamic than most of the other friendships I have today. One of the things I’ve noticed is that I can go long months without seeing Adam, or even talking much with him, then suddenly we see each other again and it’s as if we haven’t seen each other for a couple days. Knowing a person for that long also gets you into a certain routine with them. You begin to accrue a history together and half of your time when together is spent talking about things that happened 5,7,or 10 years ago.

I can say with full confidence that, like fine wines, friendships get better as they age and that the truly great ones are those that last across the years, through the many chapters of life. And Adam, here’s to another 15, may it be better than the last