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“Friends to the end.”

That is the only spelling and grammatical rule from my educational years that I can ever remember. “I before E except after C” escapes me every time and, to this day, I am still a terrible speller and haven’t a clue what the difference between “lay” and “lie” is despite my brief career as a college professor of English. I believe myself to be mildly dyslexic (though I have never been tested) because I mix up every word and number combination imaginable and because everyone else in my immediate and extended family has a learning disability and I’ve come to think: why can’t I be special to?

I learned the aide “friends to the end” in the sixth grade because I was forever writing the word “friend” with the E coming before the I, which is incorrect. Ursula, our teacher and friend, taught me that the easiest way to recall how to spell “friend” is to remember that a friend is with you to the end — which is also how the end of the word “friend” should be spelled in the end. I wrote the word “friend” a lot. The only thing I could draw with any skill were large bubble letters with just a hint of three-dimensional shading and, as that my creativity had not yet matured, the only thing I ever wrote in my big bubble letters was: “My Friend Ben.” That became a sort of common bond between us. I was “My Friend Damon” and he was “My Friend Ben” or M.F.B. and M.F.D. for short. As I consider the amount of paper and ink spent inscribing these three words over and over again during the sixth grade I realize that while we had the beginnings of wonderful friendship, we also had much too much time on our hands. The monikers stuck. We cannot refer to the other in the third person without first including the prefix “My Friend”. To this day, our acquaintances often interrupt us in mid-sentence, slap our faces, and say:

“Look: I know he’s your friend! You don’t have to say ‘my friend Damon’ all the time. I knew who he is already. I met him. I took the tour. I bought the souvenir. I remember. ‘Damon’ will do just fine from now on.”

Of course we nod and smile and go back to calling each other “My Friend” when they are no longer listening or have been “taken care of”. What everyone seems to be missing is that adding “My Friend” to the beginning of an introduction by either one of us is not meant as a conversational reference tag; it’s not meant to help our listeners understand us better or to give everyone the appropriate context and background to our statement. I don’t care that you know if he is my friend or not or even if you know who he is: it’s just how we refer to each other in the third person. That is all. No need to get worked up about it. You can do it too.

“My Friend Ben” illustrates one of the defining principles of the known-universe (at least, that part which is known only to me). And that is: I just don’t care what you think. It’s not about you, it’s about me, and the sooner you get that through your head, the quicker we can becomes friends too.

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