Friendship

I never thought it would come to this, but at this stage of my life, well, indeed for the last ten years or so I have compulsively covered the walls of my study (when I lived in Massachusetts) and my bedroom and bathroom (down here in Sarasota) with photographs of my family and relations, but more than that photos of friends.  I look at them often.  This morning the face of woman now dead caught my eye, a woman who was a close friend for fifty years, and,  though bereft of her company as of so many others, I bask in the glow of the memory of that psychic and spiritual (never physical) intimacy.  And thinking of her made me think of Palo Alto and that moved my mind onto another figure, a true mentor, uncle, brother, older by seven years whom I really got to know while teaching at Yale and who was hugely instrumental in my going to California a year after he had gone out there.  He, too, is dead, died young at 43--from this perspective so very, very young, like my first wife who went at 26, also of a heart attack--but the thought of him produces in me the warm glow of a child who knows he is loved and protected; I didn't have a living father, caring brother, either, so his caring presence was all in all to me in those days.  And my first wife, also a friend, a dear friend with whom I never stopped talking, until of course I finally did; the conversation ended when her heart stopped beating, only twenty six years old, what a warm, and lovely woman, vanished in the late afternoon, after a day of merriment, deep serious conversations, and horitzontal intimacies, vanished, as a thief in the night takes away the family jewels.  There is a photo of us walking down the aisle, but somehow it was all so long ago, so different a world, before I was a professor, before I was a father, before, before. . . . and somehow too unreal to think the married couple of those long ago days actually had actually inhabited this planet.  I look in another direction and I see two lovely young women smiling at me from just above my desk, not quite so young in real time, but we were all young and laughing then, and we still laugh now when we get together, and the sight of them gives me bubbles of joy.  They say it is a tiresome thing and a waste of time to be nostalgic, move on they say, but I am not convinced the occasion is ripe for making friendships like those in the world I live in now, a new city, a new environment, associations with people carrying like myself the baggage of treasure of the experiences of a lifetime. As a friend of mine once said thirty years ago now, I believe, when going with me to a cocktail party of people we neither of us knew well, said: "I should have printed out an autobiographical sheet, because I sure as hell am not prepared to go through my life story with new people at this late date."