The way I remember it, Aristotle identifies three types of friendship: the first is based on pleasure, the second, on utility, and the third on a recognition by both parties of the good in the other. So first, you’ve got your buddy you see at symposia and share goatskins of wine with, next, the chum who helps replace the broken wheel on your chariot, and finally, your companion in whom you see the virtues you embody represented and who reflects them back to you as an illustration of your own best character.
To that list, we might add a fourth category: people you ride bikes with on an overcast summer night, occasionally splitting up, but then reforming together as one large group to commandeer a skate park, turning it into a temporary outdoor beer garden and revival meeting. These relationships, even with those whose names continually elude you, encompass all three of Aristotle’s distinctions, with an extra ineffable lagniappe: you get to be part of a rolling clown car of predictable nonsense combined with cycling routes both familiar and unprecedented, and all this without a cover charge, under greyscale skies etched smartly by nature’s soft charcoal hand.
Two residences were stopped at and at least one offered beer cans; a minor crash was weathered with no broken bones; a light mist fell at some point, but spirits weren’t dampened—in fact, some were even passed around in plastic shot glasses for the assembled to partake of.
Many of the best parts of summer happen in spring: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the Girls of Summer All-Girl Alleycat; these longest days of the year, but as this year’s solstice approaches, all indications portend that the ensuing season will be one to cherish: even if there isn’t swimming on a given night, there can still be dancing, which really is just another kind of swim, especially when you’re surrounded by friends of the fourth type, pleasure, utility, and the good.
To that list, we might add a fourth category: people you ride bikes with on an overcast summer night, occasionally splitting up, but then reforming together as one large group to commandeer a skate park, turning it into a temporary outdoor beer garden and revival meeting. These relationships, even with those whose names continually elude you, encompass all three of Aristotle’s distinctions, with an extra ineffable lagniappe: you get to be part of a rolling clown car of predictable nonsense combined with cycling routes both familiar and unprecedented, and all this without a cover charge, under greyscale skies etched smartly by nature’s soft charcoal hand.
Two residences were stopped at and at least one offered beer cans; a minor crash was weathered with no broken bones; a light mist fell at some point, but spirits weren’t dampened—in fact, some were even passed around in plastic shot glasses for the assembled to partake of.
Many of the best parts of summer happen in spring: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the Girls of Summer All-Girl Alleycat; these longest days of the year, but as this year’s solstice approaches, all indications portend that the ensuing season will be one to cherish: even if there isn’t swimming on a given night, there can still be dancing, which really is just another kind of swim, especially when you’re surrounded by friends of the fourth type, pleasure, utility, and the good.
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