RIVER CITY JOURNAL: OLD FRIENDS ARE FOLKS WHO REMEMBER YOUR REAL HAIR COLOR

Close friends aren't always those who are closest. Really good friends remember the silly stuff but don't tell anyone.

Among the advantages of living all over the United States -- 11 towns, some of them cities, over 34 years -- are the friendships my wife and I have been fortunate to find.

And keep.

One of our oldest and dearest friends is a native Kansan who wound up with me on the same floor of the same dorm at the same college. Giles -- our younger son, Brendan Giles, is his namesake -- has moved just about as often as we have, but not always the same places, of course.

For Giles, life has followed a familiar path of growth, change and settling in. In college, Giles was the liberal, but he grew to be not just a staunch conservative but one who expressed himself as the editorial page editor of one of North Carolina's leading newspapers and, later, the editorial voice of one of the Raleigh television stations.

I like to tell people that I pushed Giles into journalism. After his college days, he became a vagabond. For a few months while we were living in Dallas, he moved there too and worked for a company that made fake marble. He took a job on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico only to discover he was acutely susceptible to seasickness. He became the one-man municipal maintenance department, in Georgia or some other Deep South state, for a hamlet where the highlight was painting parking meters and fire hydrants. He dug graves for a huge cemetery in Chicago. He worked on a construction crew building houses in Salt Lake City.

By that time, I was a newspaper editor in Nevada, Mo., the home of Cottey College on the western edge of the state. I needed a reporter. Bad. I decided reporting was something Giles could add to his string of experiences. If he was ever going to write the great American novel, he would need the discipline and stamina of a small-town newspaper reporter.

At least that's what I told him.

He bought it.

Giles became godfather to both our sons, a post he takes seriously even though he rarely sees the boys. He got married and started having children of his own. He moved to Arizona, then Ohio, then North Carolina and, more recently, back to the family farm in northeastern Kansas while he tried to sort out some of the complications life frequently bestows on all of us. A couple of years ago he moved back to North Carolina, where he once again is an editor for a daily newspaper.

We see Giles occasionally. Actually, I can tell you exactly how often:

First there was college. Then a one-day visit to the farm in Kansas. A weekend visit to our apartment when I was a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star. The Dallas months. A brief visit during a Dallas-to-New York move while he was living in Chicago. A one-night visit in Salt Lake City when we were moving from New York to Idaho. A weekend visit to our new Idaho home. The Nevada months. A quiet dinner at our home in Topeka.

That's it.

How do I remember this in such detail -- particularly, as my doctor likes to remind me, at my age?

I think it's because over those 35-plus years we have never had the close and constant companionship of many lifelong friends, but we've had that rarest of relationships that may be disconnected in terms of geography and still held together by an unbroken thread.

For example, I can pick up the telephone after a lapse of several years and call Giles. As soon as he answers the phone, we pick up conversations that started long ago. Really long ago.

We haven't always agreed on everything. Far from it. He went way overboard in his support of George Bush in the campaign against Bill Clinton. I told him so. Looking back, I marvel that he had our current president pegged long before the rest of the country was paying any attention.

This week I called Giles to let him know I had run across a mutual acquaintance from our years in Nevada who wanted to know where he was and how he was getting along. He was pleased that someone from 20 years ago would still be concerned. I can tell you if they ever talk on the phone, it will sound a lot like our conversations: the feeling of shoes that are too grubby to wear in public -- but you sure wish you could.

Heck, sometimes I do.

As the wonderful stories have been told this week about our neighbors and friends during Random Acts of Kindness Week, I am reminded that one of the best possessions anyone can have is a friend. And one of the nicest things about telephones is that a friend you haven't seen or talked to for a long time is unexpectedly at the other end of the line.

The next best thing is finding out a friend you didn't even know you had has done something nice for you.

I hope you have shared at least a little of the spirit of a special week devoted to random acts of kindness. I hope you have a friend -- or maybe a whole bunch of them -- you enjoy talking to or visiting or golfing with or sharing a dinner with.

Friends are the mortar that holds the bricks of our life together.

I don't know who said that.

Maybe I did.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.