Old Friends: An Elegy

It had been a while, but suddenly, there was a hunger—a hunger I didn’t immediately recognize. As usual, I was bringing another batch of books down from the attic in my attempt to read a play, screenplay, musical libretto, opera libretto, or teleplay every day. I came across an old volume of Sam Shepard’s plays and a memory flashed. Of being a young teenager and sitting up all night with my older friend—the only other local I knew who loved theatre—and dreaming of doing our own production of True West, like Gary Sinise and John Malkovich. In fact, staying up that late, we once caught the video presentation of that production and, on one of the last occasions we spoke, we mourned Shepard’s death because his plays had made us dream of careers in the theatre so long ago.

Old friends...

If anyone were to ask me today, I would say I have four best friends. They all have lives—living mostly in distant places, flourishing in their life. They are the best people I’ve ever known—including their spouses—and I tell everyone I have the best friends in the world. But only a short while ago, I would have told you I had two best friends—two different people who knew me better than anyone else in the world. We are estranged now but at one time, we were closer than anyone else in the world.

What is a friend? I’ve gone through several definitions in my life. I used to think it was a person you could call at one in the morning and ask, meekly, if liking Bryan Adams was okay. Of course, this is the sort of thing you do in your twenties but having sounding boards are important. As I look back on it, my original “best friends” were more sounding boards for my own ideas than anything else. I would often be accused of giving advice when it was not solicited, and I accused others of thinking of their response before I had finished speaking my peace.

None of it matters now, of course. That one friend who I would do scene studies with and make amateur movies with all night is living in some other universe. It’s close to here—it may even share some geological similarities to where I live—but we never cross paths. He has become one of these new activist-types. They are not really interested in social justice or any of that, but they’d rather die than be considered not. I am an artist who is no advocate, ally, or protestor. I live my life quietly, simply, thinking of the eternal things. This is deeply unpopular in this day and age. But I do not believe words hurt as much as actual violence. I don’t feel my point in life is to fight for causes. For the most part, I want to be left alone, and I keep my ideas to myself.

But I wasn’t always like that. I would speak my mind with the two people mentioned heretofore and never be chastised for it. Because of the political and social events of 2016 to 2021, my sense of humor and way of looking at the world became much more ironical. I could not, in good conscience, take seriously the new ways of the world—the Orwellian language, the evolving social rules, the public shaming. In the old days, in the wee hours, I could say anything I wanted—at least to two friends. But suddenly, I couldn’t. A trust had been broken. A bond severed. It had been severed many times before, but it was painful the final time because the one friend’s child, my godson, was involved.

I know nothing of parenting, but I worry sometimes about sociological nonsense drenching over our young people and them being completely disconnected to a world of freedom of thought, teeming with self-censorship. I guess since it was my godson, I thought I had some say in what/who could be brought into his life, but this ceremonial title means nothing. And it is a title I gave up because I couldn’t bear to look at this father anymore.

Then, there was another friend, one who went mad in a different way. I don’t wish to go around mad people and his break from reality came as one day I knew it would. What do you do when you see someone’s mental state deteriorate? You can’t expect for them to understand when you try to bring them back to reality. In the end, one could say the same about both friends. Some are reading this and see the problem as me, but I can’t stand to attention every four years and change, change, change, change.

I write often on this blog about a world I do not understand and my attempts at trying to “get it.” In the end, this misunderstanding of our destiny led to the release of two people from my life who I had hoped to have forever but are now distant memories. There were few nights or weekends where I was not by their side and now, I never talk to them.

I wrote a little poem—it has a rhyme(!), my poems never rhyme except by accident—and it expresses more than I could say in prose:

What does it mean to lose a friend?

How do you say, after a

lifetime, it’s the end?

How do you move on?

Was a smile just a yawn?

Was the garden never meant to tend?