You've Got A Friend

Friends in All Places

• Jill Heinerth

There was a time when friendship was defined by geography. Your friends were the family next door, the kids in your school, or whoever happened to sit beside you in math class for an entire term. If someone moved away, they vanished into the fog of history, surviving only in fading yearbook signatures and the occasional awkward reunion encounter at the grocery store.

Now, friendship has become wonderfully strange.

Young people today may have best friends they have never met in person. They play video games together from opposite sides of the planet, share secrets through glowing screens at 2 a.m., and know one another’s fears, humor, and heartbreak without ever having shared a pizza. Some older generations find this baffling, but honestly, I’m not sure it is any stranger than bonding over dodgeball in Grade 7 gym class.

Above: Jill, Russell, Trish, and Jackie. Friends indeed!

Social media has transformed friendship into something less geographic and more tribal. We gather around shared passions, values, anxieties, and obsessions. We follow people who make us laugh, challenge our thinking, or reassure us that we are not losing our minds. Sometimes these connections are meaningful and supportive. Sometimes they are just highly specialized echo chambers where thousands of people agree that sourdough bread is a personality trait.

We also live in an age of resurrected friendships. People we have not spoken to since high school suddenly reappear online, often looking suspiciously unchanged while the rest of us wonder when our knees started making noise. A single friend request can reconnect decades of history. Sometimes that rekindled connection becomes genuine friendship again. Sometimes it simply reveals that the boy who ate chalk in fourth grade now has very strong opinions about cryptocurrency.

The word “friend” itself has stretched. It can mean someone who would help you move a couch. Or someone whose posts you “like” twice a month but have never met. It can mean a podcast host whose voice accompanies your commute, or a group of strangers who rally around shared grief, hobbies, or hope.

At the same time, the rules of communication have changed beneath our feet. A text message now comes with the unspoken expectation of an immediate reply. Instagram has quietly become another messaging platform. Everyone enthusiastically adds you to a WhatsApp group that pings constantly for three days before being permanently muted and psychologically abandoned. Even phone calls have changed. Once spontaneous, they now feel like formal diplomatic events requiring advance scheduling and emotional preparation.

All of this creates room for misunderstanding. A delayed response can feel personal when it probably just means someone is overwhelmed, distracted, travelling, working, parenting, or simply trying to keep up with the relentless flood of notifications. Modern friendship sometimes asks us to extend a little more grace than we used to.

Above: Jill with plenty of Dive buddies at Chuuk, Micronesia

It’s part of the reason Robert and I began publishing our weekly newsletter. It draws our circle of friends a little closer together. There’s something comforting about imagining someone settling in with a Sunday morning coffee and spending a few quiet moments reading our thoughts from wherever they happen to be in the world. It reminds us that connection does not always depend on distance.

So perhaps we can all agree on one thing. If a friend reaches out after a long absence, resist the temptation to measure the silence. Just pick up where you left off. Life is noisy and complicated now. The people who matter are still there somewhere beneath the algorithms, missed calls, muted group chats, and unread messages.

Perhaps friendship has never really been about proximity at all, but about feeling understood. We are drawn toward people who make us feel seen, heard, and a little less alone. The technology may have changed, but the human longing underneath it remains remarkably timeless.

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Support Independent Music

• Robert McClellan

The price of a very bad seat at a recent Rolling Stones concert tour was over $400 USD. Better seats ranged from $800 to $1600. These are face value tickets that don’t include fees and taxes. Seats on the resale market were easily going for three to four times face value.

Tickets to Taylor Swift’s recent Eras Tour ranged from between $100 to $445 per seat at face value, but Toronto tickets on sites like StubHub commonly started around $1,600 CAD, with prime seating reaching $11,000–$12,000.

Blue Collar, working class hero Bruce Springsteen’s Land of Hopes and Dreams tour are offering premium seats at close to $5000 USD. The official tour tee-shirt goes for $85 bucks!

I saw Springsteen twice: One acoustic set at a small club outside Philadelphia where he was the support act, and at the grand opening of E-Street sax player Clarence Clemons’ club at Red Bank, New Jersey - For free.

Betraying my Baby Boomer credentials, I attended concerts by many of the classic rock acts of the late 70s and early 80s: Alice Cooper, The Who, Elton John, Rod Stewart, BTO, King Crimson, Billy Joel, Prince, The Pretenders, etc...etc.. I don’t recall paying more than $18 to $20 USD for great seats! Tee-shirts were $12 and pins for your leather jacket were $1.99.

I worked in the live music business for about ten years, so I understand the economics of launching a big tour. And, obviously there is a fan base out there willing to pay whatever price is required to see a live show by an artist they admire.

However, for every MegaStar charging $1000 for an arena seat, there are hundreds of independent musicians who are extremely talented and entertaining that are playing small venues and trying to keep their music career upright and afloat. Your $10 cover charge or $15 CD purchase may be the difference between them having gas money to make the next few gigs, or groceries in the cupboard.

I highly suggest you make plans to attend a local concert or festival this summer. You may discover a fresh new talent and come away with a cool tee-shirt and a CD for your dust-collecting stereo player over on the shelf.

Above: Lynn Miles accompanied by Prairie Oyster’s guitarist Keith Glass at Carleton Place Gallery

This past week Jill and I went out to see Canadian Singer/Songwriter Lynn Miles play an intimate concert at our local art gallery. Lynn is a Juno award-winning folk musician (the Canadian version of the Grammy), and has a long, steady career that spans almost 50 years and 19 albums. For $35 we saw an iconic musician perform for an intimate audience of 50 people, and we had a chance to mingle and enjoy the fellowship of our music appreciating neighbours. This is the way I prefer to experience live music - up close, personal, and directly supporting the artists.

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We hope you have a pleasant, musical, prosperous week!