A couple of nights ago, I bounced into the kitchen to make a Bagel Bite when I walked in on a couple of friends crisping up Dino Nuggets in the panini press. As we waited for our Bagel Bite and Dino Nuggets to get hot and crispy, we started shooting the shit, and somehow the subject of nursery rhymes and other songs from childhood came up.

After we’d just finished debating the merits of “Humpty Dumpty” (consensus: it’s very silly) and the horror of the old woman who lived in a shoe (seriously, go read that one again), someone brought up how much he hated the song about gold and silver friends. You know, the one that goes Make new friends, but keep the old/One is silver and the other gold. His argument was that since there’s no question that gold is better than silver, a song that’s trying to make kids respect both new and old friends is shooting itself in the foot by making one group gold and the other silver.

But which friends are supposed to be gold, and which are supposed to be silver? The song isn’t especially clear on this point, but I think we can assume from how they’re ordered that the new friends are the silver ones, and the old friends are the gold ones (and old also rhymes with gold). But even if gold is better than silver, are new friends that much worse?

Silver may not be as good as gold, but it is very shiny. (I suppose gold is just as shiny, but shiny just seems to go better with silver.) Know what else is shiny and flashy? New friends. Everything they do seems so fun and smart and cute; everything they talk about is stuff you haven’t heard about before and is super interesting — having shiny new friends is exciting.

But as you keep getting to know them, some of that shininess might start to dull — maybe you’ll realize that you lapse into awkward silences when straying out of the one or two topics you normally talk about, or maybe they’ll reveal things about their personality that make you make that noise where you grit your teeth and breathe in through them — and the frequency and enthusiasm of your interactions might start dwindling.

Or maybe the shininess won’t dull. Maybe you’ll realize that they’re actually that super cool and see that you’ve made a real BFF. Those are your old/gold friends — the ones you love despite their faults, the ones you’re going to miss the most when you go separate ways after graduating. Having shiny new friends is exciting, and you definitely want to have them (all gold is gauche — have you seen Donald Trump’s apartment?), but do you want to invest in gold?

College can really mess with these lines. With all the fascinating people around us, we’re always making shiny new friends, and silver can start to look like gold so quickly, especially if you’re living together in the friend incubators that are dorms and houses. But just as easily as new friends become old friends, old friends can become forgotten friends; I’m sure that many of us have been really tight with one friend one year (or even one or two quarters), only to end up drifting apart the next, for any number of reasons.

It’s awful, but also somewhat understandable — given how busy Stanford students are, juggling so many friends isn’t always the easiest thing to do, especially when there are always shinier new friends to get to know. This is where being able to put ourselves in our friends’ shoes really helps. Maybe our busyness is actually coming across as aloofness, or maybe that friend’s aloofness is actually busyness. We can’t know what everyone really thinks about us (and how awful that would be), but being considerate and understanding goes a long way in keeping the old (friends).

Four years go by really quickly; it seems like just yesterday that I was moving into Larkin and goggling at how beautiful Stanford was. At the end of those four years, you might have a pile of people you stayed close with, a pile of people you felt okay drifting away from and a pile of people you drifted away from and wish you’d gotten to know better.

How you can minimize that last group is up to you (I’m the last person to be giving advice on that), but maybe there’s one last insight to be learned from that song — polishing your gold every once in a while might be hard to do, but restoring tarnished gold is so much harder, no?

 

Tim is going back through nursery rhymes to see what other insights he’s missed. Tell him your favorite one at [email protected].