By Herbert Hadad
Illustrations by Scott Laumann

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
— From “On Friendship,” by Kahlil Gibran

I used to believe that true friendship is something that lasts forever, a pact based on enduring affection and trust. Now I’m not so sure. Let me tell you about the woman on the train in Prague.

I adored being in the Czech Republic last year with my wife and daughter. We had many adventures together amid beautiful and exotic sights. But the visit was not all bliss. The people we passed in the streets didn’t acknowledge a smile or a wave or a hello in any language. They didn’t want to know you. Sometimes the isolation made me feel troubled, disoriented.

One afternoon, on the subway known as the Metro, a blonde woman of about twenty-five or thirty wearing a pink sweater and blue jeans entered our car. She sat down across from us, looked at me, and smiled.

It was a modest, closed-mouth kind of smile, but it was warm and genuine. It said, I know you are tourists, I am proud of my city, and I hope you are enjoying it. I smiled back. We never said a word. Our friendship—for I felt a deep and instant connection to her—lasted about four minutes. But it became more important to me than the castles and the bridges, the squares and the cathedrals. She was my highlight.

Thinking about her got me reconsidering the nature of friendship. I even dug up and dipped into a copy of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, whose poetry has fallen in and out of fashion for several generations now. Gibran was a Bostonian who had emigrated from his native Lebanon, as did one of the best friends I ever had, Morris Hadad. My dad was not a poet. But in his simple elegance, his piety, and his generosity, he was poetic.

When I thought about Dad, what I remembered were the small, spontaneous moments. The happiness in his eyes when, as a little boy, I tried on his bow tie. The pleasure he took in introducing me to his friends at work after they’d seen me win a boxing match. His delight in speaking Arabic to the South End grocer. The painstaking forbearance he summoned when domestic tranquillity was suddenly shattered (all he would say was “Your mother is on the warpath,”an image that always amused me).

I also consulted two other old friends and neighbors, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to see what guidance they could give. Emerson wrote, for instance: “Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.” And: “We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected.”

As for Thoreau: “Friendship is never established as an understood relation. . . . It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and the rarest faith.”

I knew all these observations were true. Some friendships magically burst into being. Others begin modestly and need occasional tending to flourish. But the question lingered: Why, exactly, were my friends my friends?

The summer I became a reporter and photographer for the Keene Sentinel, away from home for the first time, the big story in southern New Hampshire was the Ghost of Glebe Road.

A strange white apparition had been spotted on the outskirts of town, and quickly became a local phenomenon. At night, families gathered with lanterns in the woods or along the roads, hoping to be thrilled or frightened by a ghostly streak.

I wrote about the mystery almost every day. One night, I photographed a slight, middle-aged man tiptoeing through the woods behind his outstretched flashlight, timidly seeking the Ghost. He told me his name was Tom Reynolds.

The next morning, after my editor saw what I had, he whooped with mean glee. “How did you get this picture?” he said. “This is terrific! Look at this goof.” The photo ran big in the middle of page one.

Several days later, Tom appeared in the newsroom. My editor withdrew. I didn’t know what to expect. “I want to thank you for making me famous,” Tom said to me. “The boys down at New England Screw, where I work, are ribbing me, but it’s all good-natured.”

One night the following week, the police called my rooming house around midnight. Officer Olson, ordinarily stingy with information, was gushing with pride: “We got your Ghost. Come down to the station, and take a look for yourself.”

I was led to a cell that held a handsome teenage boy, shoeless and in his underwear. A more practiced reporter would have tried to interview him, but I was speechless and just stared. He stared back, more anxious than scared, looking painfully alone. The white bedsheet he had worn was on the floor outside his cell.

“The headshrinkers will decide what to do with him now,” Officer Olson said. “Not so sure his family wants any part of him.”

A little more time went by, and Tom stopped by the newsroom again, wondering if I wanted to come to his house after work for a beer.

Living in a new town had been lonely for me, even with the occasional company of a local girl. Mostly I ate at the Greek diner in the square, then went up to the Three Monkey Lounge in the Ellis Hotel to kill time with the other patrons there. So I went to visit Tom, and even though there were thirty-five years between us, we enjoyed each other.

It became a routine. At least a few times a week, we talked on his second-floor porch as his missus, whom he introduced once, fussed somewhere in the house. Sometimes I’d stop at the state package store to buy the beer.

His pleasures became my pleasures, and they were small and simple. He might draw my attention to a particular window over at the house next door. A figure would flit by, then return and gently pull down the shade. “That’s Mrs. Gedney,” Tom would say mischievously.

So we sat, sipping beers from the bottle as the sky grew dark, talking about the Ghost and life in a small town while the lights went on in the houses around us. One time, he haltingly told me why he and his wife had never had children, and it was clear this was the biggest disappointment of his life.

When the big paper in Boston telephoned to offer me a job, I knew the news would hurt my friend, but all Tom said was “I’m proud of you, boy. Good luck.”

By the late 1980s, I was a freelance writer and editor, working for the New York Times and a start-up Internet company. One morning, as I wrote a newspaper feature at home, the phone rang, and a voice said, “Happy birthday, Herbie.”

I recognized it immediately. The last time I’d seen Bobby Grande was at least two decades earlier, over ice cream at Brigham’s in the Back Bay.

He’d called Information to find me. We caught each other up on our families, then started reviving old memories. I told Bobby how proud I’d been the day he knocked Carl, the high school bully, down the stairs. Laughing, he remembered my cafeteria antics: How I’d tap the crumbs off my sandwich, imitating a socialite knocking ashes off a cigarette. Or shoot my left arm into the air, ostensibly to expose the watch on my wrist, then look down at my right arm, where the watch was actually strapped.

He reassured me I hadn’t jumped the gun, as sore losers had charged, when I set a 50-yard-dash record in White Stadium in Franklin Park. I reminded him he was the handsomest guy in the school, if not the entire Boston public school system.

The call led to dinner in Boston and a first meeting with Bobby’s wife, Gail. At the restaurant, I paused in slicing through a wonderful veal chop. “I figured you’d be beautiful,” I told her. “I had no idea you’d be brilliant.” Bobby smiled. Gail beamed.

Still, if friendship is based on an honest exchange of thoughts and feelings, there was a matter to be faced. Bobby had become Roberto Grande, the painter, and I had to discover if I thought he was good. My wife and I went to see his oils. As I entered his Dorchester studio and looked around, I felt an enormous wave of pleasure and relief. “He has it all,” I whispered to Evelyn. “Energy, ambition, talent. Bobby’s the real thing.”

A union closer than our first grew. We visited each other’s homes. Calls were exchanged once a week, gifts almost as often. I helped him get publicity for his paintings. Evelyn helped him get a show in New York.

Recently, I asked Bobby why he had called after so long. “I was thinking about old times, and you just popped into my head,” he said. “I probably phoned because you didn’t miss things, things didn’t get by you. And suddenly I realized, Gee whiz, it’s the sixth of October.

“After we talked, I said to my wife, ‘This is amazing. I don’t see Herbie for twenty-five years, and it’s like no time has passed. He never grew up. Thank goodness.’”

I met James Bullock at the Department of Justice office in New York, where we both work. He seemed a fairly unlikely prospect for friendship.

He was a champion weightlifter; I was a treadmill walker with a bad back. We were of different races and religions. He was about ten years younger. He was a vegetarian who wouldn’t even walk through nearby Chinatown, where I ate lunch almost every day. He could be profane, using language I rarely said in private. He was a paralegal specialist who dressed “down”; I was a press officer who went to court, arranged press conferences, and always dressed “up.”

But still there was a spark of interest, an incipient mutual affection. Over the next months, we discovered we had a lot in common. We truly loved our wives and families. We hated affectation and pomposity. We enjoyed pranks and good laughs.

Like Bobby, James began demanding to see my watch trick. Before long, he was giving me a “brothers” handshake and hug in the morning, which I’d follow with an affectionate left jab into a shoulder almost as big as my thigh. We started genuinely to feel like brothers. We were honest with each other.

So I said one day, “Get a jacket and a tie. And a better pair of shoes. I’ll take you over to Century 21”—a downtown department store—“if you want.”

“Do me a favor,” he replied. “Do you mind dropping dead?”

I bought him a designer tie, Joseph Abboud. He wore it. He began to dress in a suit at the office. He maintained his pride.

“Would you and I pass the Trench Test?” I asked him once. He knew what I was talking about. You and your friend, you imagine, are trapped in a wartime trench, with enemy troops advancing. If he runs away or slips to the bottom of the trench in fear, you’re both lost. If he fights alongside you, you both might survive.

He studied my face, and I his. The softness in his eyes revealed he would go to great lengths to save his friend, and I knew I would do the same. There was no real way to explain why.

James, the rough-talking hombre, began telling astonished people in the office, “I love Herb. And guess what? Herb loves me.” It was true.

When an opportunity to become the head of the paralegal group presented itself, James said he didn’t know if he was interested. “Shut up,” I said. “You’re interested. Your wife’s interested. I’m interested. Make sure you apply before the deadline passes.” I put in a good word for him.

After I went down with a back injury, the new chief paralegal specialist called me at home. Once I’d hobbled back to the office, he made runs to my favorite Syrian food shop, bringing me falafel or hummus, and a second bag filled with chicken and lamb, and spinach pies. “This is dinner for Evelyn and you,” he’d say. His face registered disgust if I tried to pay him.

I went looking for James recently after being away from the office. “A day or two goes by, and I miss you,” he said. “It’s going to be like this in twenty years, you know.”

He’s now the best-dressed man in the office. After I admired his tie one morning, he said, “Get me an old tie off your coat rack. I’m giving this one to you.”

“No. Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s my favorite, Meathead,” he said.

Gibran, Emerson, Thoreau, Shelly. Dr. Sheldon Stick, to be precise, professor of education at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Northeastern graduate, and a kid from the old Roxbury neighborhood. I consulted him, too, asking why he and I had stayed in touch—what was the denominator?

Shelly had a philosophical take. “It is important for me to interact with people who are unpretentious and comfortable with who they are,” he explained in an e-mail. “It is also much more important for me to interact with people of a comparable intellectual level than those who share similar backgrounds.” (Here I had to blush: The doctor’s correspondent had taken thirty-six years to earn his BS degree from Northeastern.)

He continued: “We’re quite different in many ways”—we’ve argued over Middle East affairs, for example—“but are able to accept and appreciate what the other values. Perhaps the critical issue is that we’re able to use the written language fluently. You are a man of letters. I wonder if language is the critical piece to a culture, and ability to communicate is what brings people together.”

Yet another source offered a deeply held reflection. Author Alec Wilkinson recently appeared on the cable TV show Benjamin Cheever and I host. Both Cheever and Wilkinson were protégés of New Yorker editor and novelist William Maxwell, and Wilkinson has written a book of homage to their mentor. The memoir ends with a letter Maxwell wrote to Wilkinson’s dad. In it, Maxwell says, “I mean, you don’t thank people for being your friend; you thank God for your good fortune in having them as a friend.”

So what’s to be learned from all these remembrances? Well, a couple of very important things.

First of all, friendships can go on happily for a lifetime or be complete in a few minutes. How long they last, I now realize, is no way to measure their quality. Each has a time, and each, as the poets teach us, is a stroke of good fortune, a blessing, a miracle.

Second, it matters little, if at all, whether the friendship springs to life in a moment or evolves over time. Every one is priceless.

And what makes a friendship?

It is the smile of an unknown woman in a Prague subway who brightens your spirits.

It is Morris Hadad’s joy when you manage to clip his bow tie around your skinny neck, because you mean, Dad, I want to be like you.

It is Tom Reynolds reaching for another lonely soul, offering a beer and the pleasure of watching Mrs. Gedney walk past her window as the evening lights go on.

It is Roberto Grande, the world-traveled and sophisticated painter in oils, giggling with childlike glee as “ashes” are flicked off a sandwich.

It is James Bullock, the angry despiser of sham, gently offering a bag of Syrian pies and a bear hug.

Friendship may consist of one brief kindness or an accumulation of thousands of kindnesses. It’s based on affection and loyalty and trust, to be sure, but I learned its essence is something else.

Ultimately, it’s an act of pure and utter innocence. All you need to enjoy it is to be ready to accept it when it comes.

It comes from the heart, as the heart knows and Gibran knew. And every little gift is great.

Herbert Hadad, a Northeastern graduate and prize-winning author, writes the Alumni Passages column.