Several years ago – and I’m talking pre-Erica, pre-marriage, pre-fatherhood, sometime during my emotionally undercooked early-20s – I bought a used paperback of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov at a secondhand store. Here at 43, I don’t recall the circumstances that led me to this particular copy – where I was, whatever else I was doing, if that day involved discount pants – but at that time in my life, like many emotionally undercooked early twentysomethings, I often ambled into dusty secondhand stores out of boredom and/or curiosity, and in this case it was during the peak of my hardcore Belle and Sebastian phase. I became intrigued by Dostoevsky after the Belles name-dropped him in “This is Just a Modern Rock Song,” but I was even more intrigued by the inscription I found on the inside of the front cover, which reads thusly:

Bob,

All peace and understanding on the day, the month rather when part of heaven broke upon you. I see the new still voice of your eyes and the small light in your pace. God knows I appreciate your friendship. Happy Birthday.

Ah the Brothers. This novel guides me always. I am sure it is the most complete novel at least for Humanities sake. Fyodor will speak to you, I hope, as he does to me (whether I’m reading or staring at darkness).

And always so all
our lives …
Leaving bread
for the sparrows

Yours,
Allen
1985

Two decades have passed and I still haven’t read the damn book. I don’t know if I ever will. Honestly, I purchased it more for the inscription. Who were Bob and Allen – best friends, brothers, star-crossed lovers? And what were the circumstances that led Bob to dispose of this particular book, one that Allen had personalized with such a tender birthday inscription? Did they have a falling-out, a bitter breakup? Or did Bob die, and his survivors simply released the book into the secondhand wild? I will never know the answer, but no matter; it’s gut-wrenching all the same.

I often step back and ask myself: Am I a good friend? I like to think that I am, but the verdict is still out. On one hand, I’ve had the same best friend for 37 years. I’ve been the best man in two weddings. I say “I love you” to multiple people, regardless of gender, on a regular basis. On the other hand, I can waffle between fiercely loyal and frustratingly absent. I can come on strong then abruptly retreat and repeat the cycle, going from 0 to 60 to back to 0. (I established a similar dating pattern following a big, ugly breakup in college.) I can swing from kind and compassionate to cold and indifferent in the span of a single text exchange. It’s a character flaw, but one I own, one I acknowledge, and probably one I’ll never comprehend, much less correct. Which is all to say, I’m not a safe bet. Yet I’ve been fortunate enough to have my share of inscription friendships, and what I mean by that is, relationships that were meaningful enough to purchase books for those friends and write heartfelt words of love and kinship on the inside. On the flip side, I’ve also had my share of falling-outs – falling-outs over big shit and little shit, falling-outs over shit I created and shit that came at me out of nowhere. It’s gut-wrenching all the same.

It’s been a year since we moved from Boise to Northeast Ohio, and my friendships, be them near or far or old or young, are in various states of order and disorder. Whenever someone moves, changes jobs or whatever, all the staying-in-touch talk comes on fast and strong. Some of the talk comes from a place of genuine intent, some out of polite, yet otherwise empty social obligation. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which, and I’ve been on both sides of it. But let’s face it: Even in the Information Age, it’s hard to stay in touch and it’s hard to stay connected, at least in the deep, meaningful ways we often expect, often need out of our friendships. And sometimes it’s just easier to let go, to train yourself not to care.

My good friend Will flew to Ohio a couple weeks ago. He was the first of our Boise friends to make the trip to see us in our new home in Hudson. Will and I had been talking about a Cleveland trip long before my family decided to move – years ago we started hatching plans to build a lost weekend around a pro basketball or baseball game – and I never doubted I would one day kick around with him in my native Land. He’s loyal like that. Will is a Major Dude in my life, a cosmic blood brother, someone I’d want in my caravan for a hard charge into the apocalypse. Few rival him for generosity of spirit, and he’s also an amazing gift-giver, and I’m not the only one in his life who has found it difficult to return the favor – seriously, I’ve had conversations with multiple people on the subject and we lament our inability to reciprocate. I keep going back to the episode of The Office where Dwight pepper-sprays Roy as he bursts in to attack Jim, and Jim’s subsequent attempts to show Dwight his appreciation for his heroics – offering to buy him a beer after work, gifting him a display case for his bobblehead – all fall flat. Perplexed by his predicament, Jim describes Dwight to Karen as an eel, and every birthday and Christmas, I’ve found myself in the same slippery situation with Will. With his Cleveland trip, which was highlighted by a whirlwind 30 hours in and around downtown, I finally felt I came close to matching gift-giving wits with him, and beyond splurging for box seats at the Jake, I realized that with Will, the best gift I could give him – as it should be with all friends – was time. And what a time we had. We’re still talking about it.

One time Will gave me a Magnolia Electric Co. shirt – partly because it’s my daughter’s name, partly because we have a mutual appreciation for the music of the late, great Jason Molina, a fellow Northeast Ohio native. The shirt quickly made its way into heavy rotation, and every time I wear it, I think of my daughter, I think of my friendship with Will and I think of my falling-out with John Serpa. I met John in 2004 shortly after Erica and I got married. We were living in Berlin, New Hampshire, and I was working for the daily newspaper. John and his fiancée, Marji, a native of the area, had recently moved there, and he found a job with the competing paper in town. John and I met on assignment – some flaccid grip-and-grin political thing inside a poorly-lit motel ballroom – and we instantly gravitated toward each other for multiple reasons: Professional courtesy aside, it was a small town and he was a new face, and a new face tends to stick out in a small town, especially when it’s a young face, and there were few other faces in that ballroom anywhere near our age. Erica and I had found that people our age in general were hard to come by in Berlin and John and Marji were finding the same, and seeing his face in that ballroom was like a beacon.

We became fast friends. Music, naturally, was the anchor. Erica and I were thrilled to have a couple to hang out with that didn’t require a three-hour drive south to Boston. Together, the four of us cut through the cold and snowy North Country nights with drinks, games and giddy back-and-forth jockeying for command of the hi-fi. The evenings were warm and glowing, everything I seek with the communion of friendship, and I still look back fondly on them. By the time spring rolled around, our small circle had extended to Marji’s sister and brother-in-law, and when it came time for John and Marji to wed that summer, we received an invitation to the ceremony.

A few weeks before their wedding day, I asked John about his bachelor party plans, and he revealed that he did not have any. Having been treated by my best man Andrew and a small band of merrymakers to a blurry bachelor weekend in Vegas just one year prior, I aimed to fix that for John as best I could. But with time running out before the wedding and all of his friends hours away from the White Mountains, cobbling together a blowout bash was not in the cards. So we did the next best thing: We got in my wagon and drove two hours to Portland, Maine, on a pilgrimage to see Magnolia Electric Co.

From 1997 to 2004, Jason Molina recorded as Songs: Ohia – that’s Ohia with an ‘A,’ as in the evergreen tree native to Hawaii, but also a winking nod to Molina’s roots in Lorain, Ohio, where he was raised. The final Songs: Ohia studio album was titled Magnolia Electric Co., which thereafter became the name of Molina’s band for subsequent albums and tours through 2009, when he withdrew from music to battle the alcoholism that ultimately took his life in 2013 at the age of 39. The first track on the album Magnolia Electric Co. is called “Farewell Transmission,” and it’s widely accepted as Molina’s best song, and in my opinion one of the best Neil Young and Crazy Horse songs not written by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. It’s earthen. Astral. Mystical. Rustic. Rocking. It’s life. The marrow. The journey. The fleeting. The forever. It’s all in there, and I urge you in this moment to take pause before you continue, remove all other distractions and spend the next 7 ½ minutes of your life with the song, preferably with the lights off and your eyes closed.

The Magnolia Electric Co. show, the first and only show I ever saw with John, was at SPACE, a Portland art gallery that doubles as a music venue at night – they literally pull drapes over the walls, wheel the display cases behind the stage, set up a small beer and wine bar and transform the room into an indie rock club. John and I had never been there before. It was early August, particularly humid for Northern New England, and shortly after entering the sweltering space we decided it would be best for our foggy constitutions to wait outside until the opener, the indie hip-hop duo Grand Buffet, took the stage. We sat on the curb in front of the venue, watching kids in cars whiz by in the muggy summer twilight, and no sooner than we had settled in, a shaggy teen dangling out of a passenger-side car window chucked a full fast-food soda cup at us and hit me square in the chest, the contents of the cardboard cup soaking my shirt. As I gathered my wits, a fellow concertgoer lurking nearby approached after witnessing the event and demanded, “What are you gonna do about it?” By this time, the car was half a mile away and certainly wasn’t going to lap back around to see what I might do about it if given the chance, and frankly, retaliation had not even occurred to me. So I glared at the lurker with my best Are-you-really-that-dumb? scowl and replied, “I’m gonna sit here and let my shirt dry before I go back inside.”

Fortunately, the sidewalk soda incident did not set the tone for the evening; I shrugged it off – laughed it off, more accurately – even before we reentered SPACE. Magnolia Electric Co. was touring behind What Comes After the Blues, the first Molina album under the new moniker and a continuation of the metaphysical Rust Belt roots-rock that made the final Songs: Ohia album so deeply and darkly compelling. The musical camaraderie between Molina and his band, polished by a long stretch on the road, was palpable, their interplay effortless. The catharsis they were experiencing on the stage rippled through the audience – you could literally feel it, and collectively, as a crowd in communion with the band, we let it soak in. Fittingly, they ended the night with “Farewell Transmission.” It was a perfect set. And I don’t say that often.

When Molina died eight years later, I had no idea he had slowly drunk himself to death over the last decade of his short life. Thirty-nine years old. I was 27 when John and I saw him in Portland and I would have guessed Molina was well into his 40s at the time. After their set, the band stepped off stage and headed toward the back of the club. We happened to be in the center of the room, directly in their path, and Molina caught a glimpse of my damp-but-slowly-drying shirt – a snarky Ohio novelty tee my brother had found and sent to me – and he pointed at it, clearly amused, then met my eyes with a smirk. I had intentionally worn the shirt in the hopes it would manifest a moment like this, and it led to a brief but powerful interaction with Molina and his band. We shook hands, made introductions and Molina and I shared some Ohio talk. He seemed anxious, unsteady, fragile. Later, John remarked that Molina seemed to cling to me in that moment, and in retrospect, given what came to light after his death, it put our interaction into new perspective. Maybe I provided an anchor for him, however fleeting it may have been, a place of familiarity in an unfamiliar place before he headed down the road again and deeper into his private despair.

John and I drove home with the windows all the way down, rambling west on US 2 through Maine into New Hampshire, blasting What Comes After the Blues and reflecting on the show with the cool air blasting our faces and the bright summer moon guiding us back to our mountain beds and the warmth of the women we loved. As I drove, John spoke excitedly about marriage, life, all of that, and having been there myself just a year before, I remembered how that felt, and here after nearly 20 years with a ring on my finger I’m fortunate to still feel that way, and in the same way yet in many different ways as well. John wasn’t so fortunate. He and Marji ended up divorcing a couple years later, shortly after having their only child, and by then Erica and I were in Boise and I wasn’t there for John in the meaningful ways friends need to be there in moments of crisis, and this after vowing to John right before we moved that I wouldn’t lose touch. And then I lost touch. He made the effort, I didn’t, and finally, with fangs out, he sent a bitter farewell transmission via pre-Messenger private Facebook message. I tried to make amends, to explain where I was with my life and why I had been absent in his, but I never got a reply. And I get it; that shit stings. Soon thereafter, John unfriended me on Facebook. I haven’t heard from him since. He might be dead for all I know, but at some point, I certainly became dead to him.

Moving puts friendships to the test. So does honesty. Same goes for misunderstandings. A year after our move, I’m standing firm with some friends, in a long wave goodbye with others, or stuck somewhere in between on shaky, undefined ground. As much as I shrug off humanity, I like knowing where I stand with people, and it gnaws at me when I don’t – especially after a fracture or a falling-out, especially when sharp silence replaces words that once flowed via satellites in the speckled sky and the intimate proximity of barstools.

Our friend, Jennifer, is fond of a saying: Friends come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. As dangerously close as that gets to an embroidered pillow in your grandmother’s sitting room, it’s a sentiment I understand and one I keep wheeling back to as I sit here and take stock of certain friendships 2,000 miles away. In her classic essay “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion opens with the line, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends,” and she’s describing her relationship with New York City as an early twentysomething, but she could just as easily be describing human relationships. Do you hold on or let go? Sometimes you simply lose your grip, like a child at the fair with a balloon, and you watch it float up and up, farther and farther away until it eventually pops, crushed under the pressure of the thinning atmosphere, and you stand there on the ground below wondering if you’re to blame, wondering if you ever even held it in your hand. I don’t like to be that person. I don’t want the balloon to pop. But sometimes it pops. That’s a safe bet.

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