Adventures in Friendship

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Adventures in Friendship

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Title: Adventures In Friendship
Author: David Grayson
Release Date: January 4, 2004 [EBook #10592]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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ADVENTURES IN FRIENDSHIP ***

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ADVENTURES IN FRIENDSHIP
By David Grayson

I
AN ADVENTURE IN FRATERNITY
This, I am firmly convinced, is a strange world, as strange a one as I
was ever in. Looking about me I perceive that the simplest things are
the most difficult, the plainest things, the darkest, the commonest
things, the rarest.
I have had an amusing adventure--and made a friend.
This morning when I went to town for my marketing I met a man who
was a Mason, an Oddfellow and an Elk, and who wore the evidences of
his various memberships upon his coat. He asked me what lodge I
belonged to, and he slapped me on the back in the heartiest manner, as
though he had known me intimately for a long time. (I may say, in
passing, that he was trying to sell me a new kind of corn-planter.) I
could not help feeling complimented--both complimented and abashed.
For I am not a Mason, or an Oddfellow, or an Elk. When I told him so
he seemed much surprised and disappointed.
"You ought to belong to one of our lodges," he said. "You'd be sure of
having loyal friends wherever you go."
He told me all about his grips and passes and benefits; he told me how
much it would cost me to get in and how much more to stay in and how
much for a uniform (which was not compulsory). He told me about the
fine funeral the Masons would give me; he said that the Elks would
care for my widow and children.
"You're just the sort of a man," he said, "that we'd like to have in our
lodge. I'd enjoy giving you the grip of fellowship."
He was a rotund, good-humoured man with a shining red nose and a
husky voice. He grew so much interested in telling me about his lodges
that I think (I _think_) he forgot momentarily that he was selling
corn-planters, which was certainly to his credit.

As I drove homeward this afternoon I could not help thinking of the
Masons, the Oddfellows and the Elks--and curiously not without a
sense of depression. I wondered if my friend of the corn-planters had
found the pearl of great price that I have been looking for so long. For
is not friendliness the thing of all things that is most pleasant in this
world? Sometimes it has seemed to me that the faculty of reaching out
and touching one's neighbour where he really lives is the greatest of
human achievements. And it was with an indescribable depression that
I wondered if these Masons and Oddfellows and Elks had in reality
caught the Elusive Secret and confined it within the insurmountable
and impenetrable walls of their mysteries, secrets, grips, passes,
benefits.
"It must, indeed," I said to myself, "be a precious sort of fraternity that
they choose to protect so sedulously."
I felt as though life contained something that I was not permitted to live.
I recalled how my friend of the corn-planters had wished to give me the
grip of the fellowship--only he could not. I was not entitled to it. I knew
no grips or passes. I wore no uniform.
"It is a complicated matter, this fellowship," I said to myself.
So I jogged along feeling rather blue, marveling that those things which
often seem so simple should be in reality so difficult.
But on such an afternoon as this no man could possibly remain long
depressed. The moment I passed the straggling outskirts of the town
and came to the open road, the light and glow of the countryside came
in upon me with a newness and sweetness impossible to describe.
Looking out across the wide fields I could see the vivid green of the
young wheat upon the brown soil; in a distant high pasture the cows
had been turned out to the freshening grass; a late pool glistened in the
afternoon sunshine. And the crows were calling, and the robins had
begun to come: and oh, the moist, cool freshness of the air! In the
highest heaven (never so high as