A number of months ago, I received an email out of the blue from a friend from high school with whom I hadn’t corresponded in 30 years: Jerry McMartin. He was a lawyer living in Connecticut (not the ultra-rich part, so he is a real person) and for his birthday his wife had bought him a music workshop in Port Orchard, our county seat about an hour south. He wanted to get together; I said of course!
I had always liked McMartin; we were tied together by a minor football legend. (I’ve recounted this history in a prior blog, “Four Fractured Ribs and a Roadtrip”.)
He flew in late on a Friday, made later by planes and our failing ferry system. We had intended to stay up and talk and I’d drive him to his workshop the next morning. We hadn’t even really been drinking, but, no, I don’t need that excuse anymore to take a fall: On the landing and fractured four ribs.
After Jerry called the ambulance for me, I’m not sure what happened, except that somehow he got to the house from my condo. He and Nancy spent what must have been an awkward time talking (they’d met only thrice, at our high school reunion, at Jerry’s Connecticut house, and at the wedding of Aaron Stone, see later). Even more awkwardly, Jerry met our daughter Kate. And then Nancy drove Jerry down to his music workshop.
It is a measure of their sanguine social dispositions that they don’t hate me for putting them in that position.
So though my reunion with Jerry was cut short, we still communicated while he was at the workshop, and, when it was over, his wife Perry picked him up and drove north and I was able to meet them in Poulsbo for lunch. Perry was so charming! She kept asking me about what I was up to. No one bothers with an old man like that anymore. Then they were off for two weeks of hiking in the Olympic National Park, then near Mt. Ranier, then the North Cascades, unfortunately, covered in smoke.
By then, I had connected with another high school friend, a trial lawyer in San Diego named Matt Burger. I think it was he who got in touch with another friend, Darcy Byrnes, a soon to be retired professor of English at a small liberal arts college in eastern Pennsylvania (it does my heart good to type that word: Pennsylvania. My parents were born there.)
Then she or someone got in touch with yet another friend, Sharon Carnes, who still lived in South Florida, where we’d all gone to high school. And then someone contacted a fellow with whom Jerry had stayed in touch, Aaron Stone, our valedictorian, a Harvard grad, a recipient of two Pulitzers.
Darcy planned a zoom call, and all of the high school friends were there. The details and outcome of that are beside the point. After 30 years, we were all in the same virtual room, recognizably ourselves.
Jerry and I had corresponded frequently by email and a couple of phone calls after he made contact. This is the point: we had grown up apart, in very different circumstances though both of us were lawyers and had turned out about the same. We are both political liberals, have the same view of legal matters, and have a similar view of humanity, though he likes it better. We can finish each other’s sentences. We have the same sense of humor. We send each other articles and Andy Borowitz posts. We’re the same person.
I’m so comforted by this. My sister is six years older, was essentially abducted by her husband at an early age, and now has dementia. My brother was nine years older, was an astrophysicist and thus lived in a different world, disappeared for a few years into alcoholism, then had stroke over a year ago and is very slow to recover. So my siblings are essentially gone.
My cousin Kathy says that it’s odd that there’s no word like “orphan” for someone who has lost his siblings.
But now, with Jerry, I have a brother again. I am so grateful.
After the zoom call, I also corresponded with Aaron, the journalist. Despite or because of his accomplishments, he is so kind and curious about me—there’s no condescension, which is definitely due. We have had similar back problems, but one thing he doesn’t do that somehow my personality has invited over the years is lecture me—tell me what I ought to do about my back. I am very grateful.
Then Darcy. Our families were actually connected; her dad got a doctorate in my father’s program in 1966 at West Virginia University, so they must have known each other. Her father was an all-American at West Virginia, and Dad loved and gravitated to athletes, as he had played basketball (and football and baseball) in college, so he must have known Darcy’s father. Then our families coincidentally moved to south Florida together, and Darcy and I were in the same class.
So after the six-person zoom call, Darcy and I had a one-on-one, and it was so nice to catch up. She recited her good friends, one of whom was Jaci Banks. Oh no! I had an enormous, unfixable, embarrassing crush on Jaci for years. In the early part of that, when I was in 8th grade, I’d not stalk Jaci so much as just put myself in her way. Once she rolled her eyes. Darcy must have known about that. I can only hope that it was a moment’s gossip in years of boy-and-girl stuff and she doesn’t remember.
Darcy asked at one point if I’d kept up with all of our friends, and I admitted that in the 90’s I was so devastated by depression and anxiety that I actively pushed people away. The trial lawyer from San Diego, Matt Burger, somehow noticed Nancy and my second book and asked if it were ours. We were in Canada on vacation, and I took that as an excuse to say yes and I’ll get back to you, which I didn’t.
Another old friend, a doctor in Utah, said that they were starting a cruise to Alaska in Seattle, and would we like to get together? I lied and said we’d be out of town. It was August, and no one in their right minds leaves the 206 in August, the most glorious month of the year.
In my last email I told Darcy about the night that Nancy went out to dinner with law school teaching colleagues. I realized that I would never be able to teach again, the one thing that I loved and was good at, and I collapsed on the sofa and cried for two hours.
Not so recently, I reconnected with my dear cousin Kathy Retan, my favorite relative, a freelance editor in Boston. Our backs are very different: she can’t sit, and I can’t stand. We both have hearing loss and have posited having dinner together, drinking Manhattans, her standing, me sitting, and shouting “What?” at each other.
Outside of that group is a fellow, Madison McRae, from law school with whom I never completely lost touch but with whom I feel much closer lately. He’s a nationally-recognized risk manager for a bank, and his job gives me a sour stomach. But he’s a complete hoot, an expert on all things Scots and physics and philosophy and bugger all and the only true baseball fan I know. One night not so long ago I was feeling very down about myself, and he called me the next morning and told a lot of lies, specifically how I was the smartest person in our law school study group. No, he clearly was. But he picked me up from the pile of self-hatred and brought me to tears with his kind words.
The point of all this is what a delicious, unexpected surprise the high school friends are. Jerry is so solicitous of my back, and he read my entire book based on the blog so carefully and found many dings and issues. Now there’s a real friend.
Aaron asks about my back and my writing—he’s finishing a book to come out in the spring about computers used to predict the 1952 election.
When I told Darcy about my depression, her face crumpled up in sympathy.
We weren’t like that as teenagers. We weren’t vicious or mean-spirited, we were merely heedless, feckless kids. Now they are truly empathetic adults. I am so lucky to have them as newly-rediscovered friends.
I’m separated, as we all know, and though Nancy is a tremendous spouse, I spend a lot of time alone. This is by my choice. I nearly ran over several oldsters in the parking lot today who were talking and wouldn’t move. I don’t like people.
But I like my old high school friends, and my cousin, and my friend Madison, and I’m so grateful for their company. To be honest, I didn’t see them coming. I’m so glad that they have arrived.
I had been led to believe that old age was a period of loss: of friends, bodily autonomy, memory, abilities. I’m in a lot of pain, yes, but I have so much to be grateful for. Thank you for in effect giving me my life back.
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