In the Company of Friends

The CBS morning news show this past Sunday aired a segment on the value of friendship. The segment focused on a group of women in Wisconsin, I think, but also reported on psychological studies that demonstrated how friendships help to ease burdens, even change people's perceptions about the relative difficulty of certain tasks. For example, in one experiment, a researcher asked a person laden with a heavy backpack to estimate the severity of a hill in front of which they stood.. When unaccompanied by friends, people perceived the slope as more severe than when accompanied by friends. The presence of friends helped to alter the perceptions so that the task appeared less arduous.
So I, in bed on a Sunday morning, got blindsided to the verge of tears by thinking about my lost friend Dave and my mother, whom I also miss. The fact that I miss my mother demonstrates the power of such attachments, considering the uneven nature of our relationship. I didn't start to crack at my mother's viewing until my friends showed up in a pack. Perhaps I then felt like I had the permission to let the facade of stoicism slip a bit, in the presence of people I had known for so long and who knew the dirt and who still continued to be there. Like when you pick the toddler up from daycare and he breaks down upon seeing you after holding it together all day. Like me, keeping it together at work all day and then coming unhinged when I get out.
The day before my Sunday morning near-meltdown in bed, I spent a few hours cleaning up around the Little League complex. Mandatory cleanup duty for for parents. I told my wife I didn't mind it so much, since I mostly spent the time by myself with a rake, tidying up while the snow fell progressively more heavily. Her response consisted of something like, "Yeah, you, by yourself on a gloomy day," meaning of course I would like that. I have to say, the activity contained a certain measure of peace. Simplicity. Just a rake and me and snow and the myriad of shit that arises in areas frequented so consistently by young people.
So the Sunday morning segment got me to ruminating somewhat on the nature of friendship and the loss thereof, and I thought that maybe the appropriate time had arrived for me to revisit a post I started months ago, one in a series reflecting on friendship and specifically my relationship with my late friend Dave.
Often I write myself notes, meant to form the foundation of the next post, the next chapter in the story. And sometimes when I return to these notes, hours or days or weeks or months later, I don't know what I meant. The urge to write something has gnawed at me for the last few weeks, sort of like a baby alligator struggling to break through the eggshell and take on the big, bad ecosystem, but nothing crystallized. So here I return to notes initially rendered in a staccato style, trying to make sense of the mess. These function more like snapshots in the scrapbook of my mind, as opposed to a narrative with a theme.
To wit, when we were in high school, we drove around in my multicolored 1969 Chevy Nova with beers between our legs and smoking Swisher Sweets flavored cigars. Or joints if we had any. We survived, though Dave appeared to be on the verge of passing out one time when the fumes from the burning engine in that same car made their way into the back seat. Burning. Literally. The car did not survive.
We fished and drank all night in the surf at the Jersey shore, not leaving until dawn. For Dave's bachelor party, we went out fishing in the cold Atlantic on a party boat. I abstained from the 7 a.m. alcohol.
Dave and I urinated under the streetlight outside the bar following my college-graduation party.
When Dave was pursuing a job as a corporate recruiter, he and I went to some kind of Native American festival because his ostensible boss had an interest in Native Americans. This guy also employed such techniques as calling a prospective recruit's mother in an effort to exert pressure on the prospective recruit to accept a certain position. I disagreed with such a tactic, but Dave didn't. Until he did, and his career as a recruiter came to an end.
The Jimmy Buffett concerts. I grew out of that phase before my friends, but there was a time when I would attend those shows, stoked on beer, and fantasize about a life that represented the polar opposite of the one I was living. Dave and I took a train to Manhattan to see Buffett at Madison Square Garden once. Dave has gotten off this train.
At the bar with the front painted like a giant American flag, hanging out with our state-trooper friends, we sang karaoke. And I sang pretty fucking well, and Dave rode my goddamned Bob Dylan-singing karaoke coattails. They'll stone you when you're walking down the street...but I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned.
I still wear Dave's New York Jets sweatshirt that he left at my place aroud 20 years ago. On balance, he made off with more of my clothes than I with his. In his later years, his taste in fashion skewed to the eccentric, and his shirts on me would have resembled kimonos, anyway.
We waded and fished the Delaware River with my son. We fished for stripers and we fished for pickerel in the pines and we fished for steelhead near Lake Erie and we fly-fished for trout and we caught herring and cut them up on the spot for catfish bait.
We golfed. I hate golf.
We celebrated Halloween at Dave's house, with the kids trolling the closed-off street for candy
We got stoned at my mother's house and Dave put the Cheez Whiz nozzle right in his mouth and squirted away.
We didn't always drink, but why do alcohol and drugs exist? Because people want to escape actual life's drudgery and monotony. Admittedly, such indulgences can be destructive, as well.
But here's what the late writer Christopher Hitchens said about alcohol:

What the soothing people at Alco­hol­ics Anonymous don’t or won’t understand is that suicide or self-destruction would probably have come much earlier to some people if they could not have had a drink. We are born into a losing struggle, and nobody can hope to come out a winner, and much of the intervening time is crushingly tedious in any case. Those who see this keenly, or who register the blues intently, are not to be simplistically written off as “dysfunctional” cynics or lushes. Winston Chur­chill put it very squarely when he defined the issue as, essentially, a wager. He was a lifelong suf­ferer from the depression that he nicknamed his “black dog,” but he could rouse himself to action and commitment and inspiration, and the brandy bottle was often a crucial prop. I have taken more out of alcohol, he said simply, than it has taken out of me. His chief antagonist, Adolf Hitler, was, I need hardly add, a fanatical teetotaler (though with a shorter and less wholesome life span). The most lethal and fascistic of our current enemies, the purist murderers of the Islamic jihad, despise our society for, among other things, its tolerance of alcohol. We should perhaps do more to earn this hatred and contempt, and less to emulate it.

Moments such as those here recounted help to sustain us when confronted with life's less interesting, and more common, offerings. We felt good during those times, mostly, in the company of friends. We snatched pockets of pleasure from the mundane. After the cancer, we mostly approached our endeavors in the same fashion. I now wish I had more opportunities for those moments.Memories don't sustain as much as I would like. It pains me to think, in particular, of the last few months of his life, when, in retrospect, he appears to have been desperate. And no matter who is there, you're alone. The last days we spent at the hospital, generally dismal places outside of maternity wards.
Gone too soon, my friend. I miss you, and I love you, which, as is often the wont of men, I didn't tell you enough while you were here.

Good Heavens

I tweeted this stuff already (@tfhofmann), mostly as notes to myself. And the 11-year-old follows me on Twitter, so I have to be judicious with respect to tweets. Anyway, the conversation after baseball practice, at which teammates annoyed son No. 2, went something like this:

8-year-old: If someone annoys you in Heaven, you can't hurt them, right?

Parent (thinking he means because you have to be nice in Heaven): Why?

8-year-old: Because it's just their soul, and you can't punch a soul. Where is your soul?

Parent: It's not something physical.

8-year-old: But where is it in your body?

Parent: I don't know.

8-year-old: From Heaven you could look down on school and laugh because you'd have tons of flat-screen TVs.