Friendship

My wife and I are on a long-awaited trip to visit Peru. It’s her first time in South America, so she is understandably excited. I have made this trip many times, but always on business. My schedule never allowed me to take advantage of the vast array of things Peru offers tourists with the great fortune of time.

I, too, am excited to see things I’ve missed on prior visits: the archeological museums of Lima, the Amazonian jungle in high-water season, the Incan capital of Cusco, the mysteries of Machu Picchu. But for me, the primary thing I have looked forward to is reuniting with friends long neglected.

These friends were all business colleagues. They were all impressive executives by any measure, and I respected them immensely. Once our business relations were abruptly severed - bankruptcy can be an ugly experience ⎯ contact between us also ended. I worried whether these relationships really amounted to friendships at all. Was there anything to them, beyond the social contract that comes with shared goals and common enemies? Was the fondness I felt for these men so many years later nostalgia-induced? Was it in any way reciprocated? After all, our failure to keep in touch had been mutual.

Our days in Lima proved my fears without basis. The warmth of their reception was genuine and genuinely moving. None of us had changed, other than a few gray hairs. Each of the three of them, Fernando, Javier and Abraham, had enjoyed great success in the sixteen years since we had last worked together. Our beautiful and charming wives got along like old friends as well, even on first meeting. It was as happy a reunion as I could have dreamed for.

An incredible surprise was the appearance at a dinner party in Lima last evening of another old friend of the same vintage, Victor, another extraordinary businessman who had led our Chilean operations to a high level of success. Unlike my three Peruvian friends present, Victor is now fully retired. The fact that he had re-arranged his plans to be in Lima on this evening to see me in itself alleviated any doubts I had about the nature of the relationships we all shared. I plan to visit Victor at his farm in southern Chile soon.

This is why we travel, or at least one of the best reasons: to maintain ties with the best people and places and experiences of our past. With today’s technology and the fact that the cost of global communication is, practically speaking, zero, there is no excuse for letting valuable friendships grow stale from neglect. I will do better. I learned my lesson in Lima last night.