“My friends are my estate.”
— Emily Dickinson

                  Americans are lonely. Whether it’s thirty or fifty percent it’s a lot, enough for the Surgeon General, in a saner era, to rate this misery epidemic. I suffered from loneliness till I met Jane. My first marriage wasn’t cordial. A boss, I couldn’t really pal with my reports. My tennis mates were only that, which made me sad.

                  I’m guessing my parents were lonely too though they’d never have allowed themselves to think so. They were too busy being who they were supposed to be to wonder how they were feeling about it. The social pals who came to their parties were friends, I assume, but did they ever confide? Confiding is the active ingredient of friendship, exulting in the confidence to confide. I craved that more than anything, but how? With whom? To confide you need to confess a need to, admit your frailty, and for me that was a no-go. Like my parents, I had to be who I was supposed to be, so I confided to secret journals with my door shut. There I could be the sniveling misfit I knew I was, as long as I kept my journals locked away. I got pretty good at talking to myself. I became my own best bud. But it wasn’t enough.

                  I broke. I ran away from home at age fifty in an RV visiting America. I wrote a book about it. (I recommend it.)  I left home old and returned home young, ready to live, ready at last to be a friend. Then Jane and I got together and my life really began. Then, a dozen years ago, these missives began, with the purpose, retrospect discerns, to recruit friends. Here I wasn’t preaching, teaching, even screeching most of the time, but being together with like-minded souls to enliven our hour. That’s why Montaigne invented the essay. His best, really his only dear friend, had died, and here in casual words he could resume their conversation. Friend-recruitment has been the unstated mission of most essayists since.

                  I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Here you are – so many, more daily. Here we are. I confide. We commune. But there isn’t time! What kind of friendship is a one-way street? I could be a bestie with many of you, I’m sure, but my dance-card is full, and I’m shortchanging my dearest.

                  Hence my apology that’s a boast – or vice versa. I am proud of our relation – and remorseful I haven’t more to give to it. I love your likes and comments – don’t stop! – they fuel me – but if you don’t hear back, know my spirit was willing but my flesh weak (and my clock understocked).

                  Robin Dunbar, an Oxford anthropologist and psychologist, who’s four years my senior, devised a theory of intimacies based on his study of primates’ brains. He posits that we can have five bosom buddies, fifteen close friends, fifty trusted friends, 150 “meaningful relationships” – 150 is known in the field as “the Dunbar number” – 500 acquaintances and 1500 faces you recognize. The numbers are averages, of course, but the concept is helpful. Friendships cost time and mental energy, both of which are limited (and dwindling, alas, in one’s later years).

                  Starved for friends in my early years I turned glutton and now I am starving the relations I so long sought. Zounds! It’s infuriating – and exhilarating. One of my favorite couplets comes from Yeats’ “The Municipal Gallery Revisited”:

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.

                  Amen to that. And regrets. And thanks.