To be my friend ...

... To be my friend, requires a special kind of person.

You must be willing to endure what most people call being ignored, for indefinite periods of time, then take up where we left off. You must not take this personally. I have scatterings of friends all over the world and I attempt to tend to them all in turn. I stay busy with this frenetic, fascinating thing called life.

Plus, I am a military brat and shaped by ADHD, too. I'm not really sure I know all the rules or have the ability to form the deep, empathetic, sympathetic bonds that most people do. (How my Beloved endures me, is an unfathomable mystery.) I get uncomfortable hanging out and making small talk. I need to be doing. I'd rather help you tear up your deck than sit in your living room.

You must understand that I crave knowledge, but that to crave and to have are two different things. You must understand the difference between a know-it-all and a wants-to-know-it-all and not presume, when I bring up Augustus Caesar or Augustine of Hippo, or the Paleozoic Era, that I am challenging your personal intellect.

You must understand that when I make a promise to you, I WILL keep it, eventually,if it can wait. But if you need something immediately, like your furniture moved, I'm there.

Back in touch

If I could have just one wish ...

(and it couldn't be for more wishes, world peace, prosperity for all, an end to all misogyny or a picnic with God)

...I might wish to be able to re-contact anyone in the world I have ever met.

I would find that little Girl, all grown up now of course, of whom I made fun in second grade for Her drab lunch box. I would beg Her forgiveness.

I would find the bully who tormented me in third grade -- and have a nice conversation during the visiting hours at his penitentiary.

I would find Kekulani S., whose every molecule I worshipped in eighth grade, whose footstep in the dust I would certainly have kissed given half a chance back then, and ask Her forgiveness for having tried to steal Her hairbrush as a keepsake of my juvenile idolatry.

I would track down Lara S., whom I wanted to love in college but just couldn't force the spark and whom I had to let go when I fell in love with my Beloved -- I would meet Her lucky husband and shake his hand and tell him to always be good to Her.

And I would render grateful thanks to a number of people who have been good to me in my life.

I don't know why this has weighed upon my mind lately. I fear that I have been wasteful in my life with the precious gift of human interaction. It is not titles or stuff that matter as the years advance: it is the gold of human intimacy.

Last week I googled the address of an old boss, my first real boss. I wrote a letter to him. I still haven't sent it. I intend to do so this weekend.

Facebook has been good for this. I am now back in sporadic contact with Darlene Tsu, as my longtime blog readers know, and other friends of whom I thought I had lost track forever ... my old buddy Jim B. (the B. is not short for Beam); and Heather from high school, too; and possibly I will be able to track down my one-time best friend Lawrence.

Just today, I Facebook-searched a former mentee from a writing class I taught years ago -- and it was great to re-connect with this brilliant soul, who now lives in Italy, vowing never to lose touch again.

Another friend found -- or soon to be

I grew up a military kid, which was in some things great, in other things not.

I made and said goodbye to more friends by age 17 than many people will in a lifetime.

Last year I reconnected, briefly, with a Goddess of a Woman from my past, Darlene Tsue, who did not remember me at all, though I remember and cherish everything about Her from Her daily mannerisms, to Her preference in cigarettes to almost every word that She ever said to me.

And now I have discovered that my best friend from high school, one of the most wonderful men I have ever met, is still alive and kicking somewhere in Florida, despite rumors to the contrary. One little payment to ussearch.com and I'll be calling him this weekend. I'm so excited.

L. was a gentle giant, a fun-loving, peace-loving, old school rap-loving, truly cool guy.

What matters

I have not posted nor responded much lately nor visited my blog friends. Been busy. Will get to it.

***

With each passing year -- and yes, I am still quite young -- I become more aware that the greatest challenge of a person's life may well be this: how one responds to the reality of aging and the certainty of death.

Perhaps that sounds morbid. But I didn't invent the concept.

One can Botox from head to toe, squeeze into clothes designed for teenagers or sport a toupee -- and fool no one.

Or the opposite: One can let one's appearance slip to a frightful state, dressing like Hapless Harry or Frumpy Fran in oversized plaids and pastels and never trimming one's nose hair.

But one can also choose to walk the middle road, of staying clean and presentable without screaming for attention, being attractive for one's age and as fit as it is still possible to be.

Pain will come. Nobody will like your kind of music anymore. Your glory day stories will become boring. How will you deal with it? Will you become a complainer, a recluse, a grouch, a crank, a crone? Will you become obsessed with death, feeling intensely sorry for yourself and insisting to all and sundry on a daily basis that you are surely dying?

This week, an old friend of mine, a mentor to me when I first joined the staff of a local newspaper, passed away. His health had been poor even back then, but he still worked hard, stayed involved in his community and looked for ways to be of service whenever he could.

I will never forget when he drove all the way from another city when my car broke down and nobody at my then-office could be bothered to help me get home.

He was a good man -- no, a great man -- all the way up to the very end. Still jovial and loving the next-to-last time that I ever saw him, though confined to a hospital bed. Silent and virtually comatose the very last time I saw him, but that was no fault of his own: he was finally on his way out, after years of physical suffering -- a subject upon which he never dwelt.

I don't know where I'm going
But I sure know where I've been
Hanging on the promises
In songs of yesterday
An' I've made up my mind
I ain't wasting no more time
But, here I go again
Here I go again

Tho' I keep searching for an answer
I never seem to find what I'm looking for
Oh Lord, I pray
You give me strength to carry on
Cos I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams

--- Whitesnake

The song opens with Big Synthesizer swelling up mighty like church hymns used to do, instantly tying it to the 1980s, when pants were parachute and hair and music was big.

But for me, every time that I hear that song, I am carried back to the dawn of my teenage years, bittersweet years in between the helplessness of childhood and the burden of being an adult.

And I think about my friend, L. How for some teenage reason we loved this song by Whitesnake and we would sing it at the top of our lungs as late at night we traversed the dark concrete wasteland of the old flightline between the two halves of the Air Force base where we lived.

We were silly and too young to care.

L. died far, far too young.

But I hear this song and I think of him. Always will.

A gift

"Please take some," She said, as She does every time that I visit Her.

She is old. She recently had a terrible infection that caused Her to act quite strangely and caused us to wonder if She had developed dementia or Alzheimers.

But yesterday, She was Her normal self, offering me flowers from Her garden.

Her first gift was two apple tree seedlings, years ago. Last year, one of them bore fruit for the first time.

Earlier this year, She offered me sprigs of flowering almond --- something She grew up with in the Shenandoah Valley, She said.

"Please take some," She said, pointing a finger towards some tall and lovely plants crowding into the space by Her front door.

She called it Valencia.

I found the perfect spot for it by the low wall next to my carport.

But none of my books mention a flower by this name, and an Internet search found nothing, either.

Perhaps it is a hybrid name or I heard Her wrong.

Nonetheless, it is beautiful.

Thank You, my friend. Stay with us, please, a few more years.

Remembering a long-lost friend

I knew him for one brief season. He was messy, somewhat moody, often mysterious.

But I could not have had a more suitable roommate to begin my university life.

I was an angry kid who had left behind, with no regrets, an unfriendly town of mostly wealthy people who looked down on people like me.

I was so naïve about so many things. I was still such a child.

D. seemed so wise. Yet he seemed to think I was intelligent, too, and he drew out my intellect with many a long, fascinating conversation.

He wasn’t rich, either. He got a crummy job like I did, in one of the university’s cafeterias.

He laid on his messy bed and played his red electric guitar, which of course I thought was the coolest thing in the world.

He knew everything there was to know about the Beatles – but a whole lot about Bach, too.

Once, he invited me to a classical concert on campus and pointed out, to my amazement, that one of the players was slightly out of tune and would soon be adjusting their instrument.

We commiserated together about the juvenile idiots, the in-crowd that made noise all day and most of the night beyond the doorway of our dorm room.

Today, I heard “his” music again – Handel’s “Water Music” – which he always listened to in order to get to sleep.

He never slept well. He wore earmuffs, played a “white noise” machine, and sometimes just gave up and went out walking, long into the night.

I knew him so briefly. I heard from his parents later. He had vanished. To this day, no one knows exactly what happened. Drugs may have been involved – he’d been into heroin, I learned then, although I don’t know how often.
It is amazing how much of who I am is based on who he was, that young man so briefly known, so long ago.