Those old, old friends
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocalProv.com
“The past is a foreign country,’’ and all that.
I was reading David Sedaris’s latest collection of essays, The Land and Its People, the other night. I find I can only read him in short stretches – don’t want to eat too much dessert. But his seeming honesty (seasoned with poetic license) and peculiar narcissism, can be, in rationed doses, sometimes LOL or moving, sometimes at the same time.
His piece about a boyhood friend whom he hadn’t seen since they were kids and had recently died struck a chord. Sedaris was stunned by how ancient and ravaged he looked in a photo accompanying news of his death, after a life of partly self-created heavy weather.
I thought of all my, oh, dozen pals from say age 6 or 7 to 13. Most I haven’t seen since I was a teenager, and probably at least half are dead. I usually learn about these deaths long after the event, along with such facts that one served prison time and another probably killed himself.
But one survivor, who for a while was probably my best friend, invited me some years ago to a reunion of schoolmates to be held at his house along the seashore of a town outside of Boston. I declined, telling him that family issues made my memories of early youth often unpleasant, maybe even traumatic. He responded, in a sort of psychotherapeutic way along the lines of “come and face up to your memories. It would be cleansing.’’ Exposure therapy?
I am certainly curious, in a sort of zoological way, to see how he looks and sounds as an old man, but didn’t want to dredge up aspects of the past, albeit not directly connected with him. I feel no nostalgia for the ’50’s. In any event, we lost touch after I went off to school in Connecticut.
“Rusty” (whose real name is William) and I had great times, exploring the woods and streams, playing cards and other games, watching idiotic TV shows and so on. He was, and I assume still is, very smart and had a distinguished career as a lawyer, professor and government official. I remember how congenial and calm his parents were, and his pretty sister.
It was only after encountering a former girlfriend of his at a party maybe 15 years ago that I started thinking about Rusty again every few months. She told me: “You look younger than Rusty.’’ Whatever, I probably won’t contact him.