What Friendship Means To Me!
by John and Barry Cowsill
September 1970
Tiger Beat Magazine
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JOHN: Oh, wow! Friendship is really hard to define, like some other words I know, like love and kindness. I think the reason that it’s so hard to define what friendship means is that there are so many different kinds of friends! I guess I’m really luckier than a lot of people, because I seem to have all the kinds I can think of!
First of all, there’s your best friend. There’s only one of those, right? A best friend is someone you’re sure you’ll know all your life, no matter what happens to you or where you’ll go! He’s someone who knows all your secrets, and no matter what kind of mistake you make, or what kind of trouble you get into, he’ll always do everything he can to help you out!
MY CLOSEST FRIEND
My first best friend was a boy named Mickey who lived right across the street from us when I was eight. All summer long we climbed over the hills in the woods behind our houses, and his dog, Hex, went with us. Hex was little and black, with a white spot shaped like an upside-down horse-shoe on his back. At the beginning of the summer, Hex was a one-man dog, but by the time he had seen how much Mickey and I liked each other, he was a two-man dog all the way! In fact, the three of us were more like three little kids than two kids and a dog! Then, one day, I heard a terrible screeching of brakes from out in front of the house, and I ran outside to find Hex lying in a huddled little heap in the street! A big car was just pulling around the corner, and Hex was lying very still. I ran back to get my Dad and he helped get Hex out of the street. Then the door to Mickey’s house opened, and he came out, his face as white as paper. I ran to him and put my arms around his neck, and we stood there, holding one another, not saying a word. For the rest of that day, and all of the next, Mickey wouldn’t eat or talk, and he didn’t want to be around anybody but me – not even his Mom and Dad!
REMAIN FRIENDS
Finally two days later, Mickey was all right again. Because I was his friend, I had been able to help him through his pain. You see, I was the only person in the whole world that Mickey could cry in front of! Later, when my family and I moved to California, Mickey and I had to say goodbye, but we still write all the time, and I’ve even had him come out to visit me once!
There are lots of other kinds of friends, too. There are good friends and passing friends, and even friends you only see once or twice in your whole life! I know a lot about that last kind, because I meet hundreds of them every time my family and I go out on tour! After every show, I meet lots of people whose friendly faces and kind eyes make me know that they are my real friends, just as much as the people I’ve known for years. I think I must be one of the luckiest people in the world, because almost any town I come into makes me feel “at home” at once! After all, what is home? It’s where your family and friends are, right? Well, when we’re on tour, I have my family with me, and everywhere I go, I meet new friends!
Really, when you come to think of it, who could ask for more? The whole world is my home, because it’s full of my friends!
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BARRY: I think friendship is a way to feel. It’s a sharing way, and between real friends the words mine and me don’t really mean anything. I mean, if I’ve got a shirt or something and my best friend likes it a whole lot, then it’s just natural for me to let him wear it, or even give it to him! I wouldn’t really feel like I was being a friend if I didn’t act like that!
Friends are really important to me. We’ve moved around a lot, and I haven’t really had very many friends that I knew for longer than a year or so. When you stay in one place for a long time and see the same people over and over, it seems to me that it could be easy to start taking friends for granted. But if you’ve moved around for most of your life, friends mean a whole lot more.
FANS ARE FRIENDS
Of course, all our fans are our friends, and their friendship makes it easier for me to be out on the road as much as I am. In fact, when I read through the beautiful letters that they send us, I feel like I know them better than most of the people whose faces I’m familiar with! Any time I feel lonely for friends, I can just go up to my room with a stack of letters, and soon I feel like I’m at a party! Sometimes, I can even hear the voices and the laughter!
There are a lot of ways that our fans match up to my idea of what a friends should be. First, they aren’t always demanding things – you know, like people who pretend to like you because you have something they want. Most of our fans just want to talk to us, like a real friend does, because they like us for ourselves. Their letters are full of chatter and some little gossip, and it’s just like sitting someplace nice, with some one you really like and talking about little stuff.
SOMETIMES SAD
Sometimes, though, the letters are sad or even desperate. Lots of unhappy people write to us to ask our advice, or maybe just to feel like there’s someone there. And these letters are friendship letters too, because, after all, what’s a friend for if you can’t take your troubles to him? I just wish that there were more than I could do to help most of the time!
Besides our fans, there one thing that keeps me from getting lonely or down, and that’s my family! My Mom and my Dad, and my brothers, are the closest friends I could ever hope for! And Susie’s groovy too, although little sisters can be a pain in the neck once in a while!
But I’ve got to admit that I really feel lucky. My family is always laughing and singing, and our house has to be one of the craziest places in the world! There’s always about thirty-seven things going on, and people coming and going, and Mom’s cooking and Susie’s running around and John and Bob are squabbling about something that will be forgotten in fifteen minutes! In fact, right now, I can barely hear myself think! Susie just came in to borrow my sweatshirt (she loves big sweatshirts) and John’s standing behind me, trying to read what I’m writing!
All right, John, here goes: I guess you and everybody else in this crazy family are my very best friends in the whole wide world!!! How do you like that?
P.S. This is John again. I like that just fine!
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