OLD FRIENDS

There is something special about having an old friend. Particularly if they are the one somebody, with whom you spent much of your life. Friday I was with the only buddy from my twenties that I still keep in touch with. We share forty-seven years of memories.

I met Stu in 1961, just after they discharged me from the Air Force. An even older friend introduced us, one that I have lost contact with. Stu and I are a couple of years apart in age, I am the older one, but we had so many things in common that age did not make a difference.

Over the years, our relationship came and went, wavered, stood rock still, crumbled and eventually endured.

Other old friends occasionally pop on the scene, but they never seem to fit right. There are the rare times I meet people from my distant past, Bronx friends or acquaintances. They never seem to slide into the little slot of my mind I hold open for them.

Little Ira, when I met him again, about ten years ago, was no longer little, but still the entrepreneur, unfortunately aggressively so. He grew from shoeshine boy and marble lord of the block into a cynical business type.

Then there was Michael, poor Michael, the friend with the most going for him, smart, athletic, good looking and now dead of an overdose.

Butch, together we stole fruit off sidewalk stands and with me broke into and old abandoned house only to find it was not abandoned. The last time I saw him was the first in fifty years. He was a retired policeman and bore the mantle of negativity that being in law enforcement develops.

Sandy, my first schoolboy crush, a grandmother now, and hardly a hint of that look that made my heart beat and my toes tread on air.

There are others, they come and go. We delight in the chance meetings and discover too soon that we no longer have anything in common.

Somehow, Stu and I have hung together, sometimes with just a thread of connection and other times laughing, eating, drinking and remembering.

Friday night was one of those special times. We sat, my wife included, under an old Banyan tree in a Delray Beach outdoor restaurant and talked. We spoke about how are lives had changed, the dreams we had as young men and the outside influences that altered us. We both wanted to be artists, I succeeded, by a circuitous route, and he became successful in sales.

Stu was the ladies-man, still is. I was shy around women. His wife and he divorced a dozen years ago. Jamie and I are looking toward our forty-fourth anniversary.

He is tall and broad and I seem to have shrunk a little. His laugh is hearty and mine subdued by a stream of tragedies. Red wine was my drink of choice and he went with diet Coke. Together we got high on the past. We remembered times like the night we decided to go fishing off Woodmere Dock. Several joints and a couple of hours later we were casting our lines from the inside of a sixty-two black MG, over the railing of the Dock and into the salt water. We drank beer and caught nothing, we probably forgot to bait the hooks, but it is a night I will never forget. Little memories build a lifetime.

The question of my daughter came up, Stu played with her on the floor of our Far Rockaway apartment when she was an infant. I watched his reaction when I mentioned that Lis had just turned forty.

Both our hands went to our faces, touching the creases, indentations and marks of age and we laughed again.

We were once more three young people together, out for a night on the town. The same two guys that played endless practical jokes on the rest of our gang and the lady who came into my life and made me the better for it.

At the end, we hugged and promised to do it again soon. It will probably happen in another year, two or maybe three. No matter, this, like the night in the MG, will be a memory I will carry to the end.

There is nothing like old friends to make you feel young again.