Old Friends

Old friends
old friends
sat on their park bench like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
falls on the round toes
of the high shoes
of the old friends
...
Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy

-Simon & Garfunkel, Old Friends

Life doesn’t always work out like we want it to. Despite our best efforts to connect and stay in touch with old friends, sometimes those efforts are thwarted and go awry, often at the last minute. This isn’t a story about mortality, although it could be, and it isn’t a story about losing touch, although it could be. Mostly, it proves to be a story about health and how the pandemic of 2020+ has taught us to behave differently.

For the second time in a month, a visit with an old friend from Brandeis was cancelled or amended because of health concerns. In the first case, it impacted the whole family coming up because of a COVID exposure. In the second, which was yesterday, we were still able to have an abbreviated version of the visit, with all the intended parties save the one who was sick (not COVID). The friend in question is the one I know as Ariel (not her real name, despite what she told us at ‘Deis in 1998) and we’ve been hanging out for a quarter century. But not yesterday.

2002 (my graduation) and 2021 (her last visit where I saw her).

I still had a lovely time with her husband and daughter and my wife and son and we FaceTimed her, sick in a hotel bed, and really this isn’t a pandemic story because it wasn’t an abundance of caution over contagion that kept her away, it was the fact that she couldn’t sit upright. So the rest of us toured our house and went to get tacos and then hung out at the library and we talked about writing and reading, Austin and Philadelphia, the past and the future. It is one of the charming features of getting older and people partnering up that their partners become our good friends too, to the point where they almost feel like old friends by proxy, and enough is shared that time can be spent even in the absence of the oldest friends.

I can look at the picture above and remember how thin and young I was, how angular my now rounded face, how dark our hair in the face of the now infiltrating gray, and wonder where it all went. But I know where it all went and it’s growth and change flitting over the surface of a constancy of connection, a tenacity of feeling. The storms I’ve weathered with my closest companions have only deepened our bonds, even in the absence of seeing them every day for meals and sharing the minutest details of our hourly struggles. “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is,” Kurt Vonngeut tells us. Told us. He’s gone now. Like my dad. Like me someday. But not yet. And absence is so much preferable to loss.