Friendship is what it's all about

The Column: 03.07.23

I spent a couple hours on the phone the other night with a man I haven’t seen since high school, he in Northern California, I in New York City, two old men recalling our youth in Minnesota. I love the telephone; it can be so intimate — like radio, which is the business I was in for years — the voice carries so much humanity, even the silences speak.

He was the older brother of my high school friend Pete who had died a week before of stage 4 squamous carcinoma that had spread through his body, making chemo and radiation pointless, but his brother and I didn’t talk much about death, we let our memories drift back to high school. His family was Catholic, mine was evangelical, he was the handsomest boy in school and dated my cousin Delores briefly, remembered her beauty; his mother was a friend of my mother-in-law, two smart women devoted to the arts and other good causes; he delivered the evening paper and remembered his customers; he was a third-string football player who didn’t mind sitting on the bench. His brother was a star halfback. Both of them, to me then and still, epitomized smarts and the essence of cool. In a little farm town, they stood out.

As I say, it was a mysterious conversation, it went on and on, threads of memory winding in and out, and if we’d been sitting across the table from each other, we’d have been keenly aware of our age, his 83, mine almost 82, but our voices were ageless, and the longer we talked, the more we remembered, life on the Mississippi, our sainted mothers and taciturn fathers, the brilliant classmate Leeds, killed by a drunk driver at the age of 20, the grief of his girlfriend Corinne, and the past became almost tangible, we were passing each other in the halls of adolescence, I bound for radio, he for diagnostic radiology. It started out as a wake for Pete but it became a séance and after the call ended, I realized what it was all about: friendship, family, kindness, brotherhood. Against the inexorable march of time, weighing our losses, we relived our common past and found it benevolent.

We didn’t talk about our children, or our careers, or old age: for two hours, we were 18 and 17, in a small town in Minnesota, seeing it with the clarity of age and finding ourselves very fortunate.

The telephone, as I say, has become my main medium. I haven’t listened to the radio for years: the voices strike me as either robotic or berserk. I have a TV but I can’t figure out how to operate the controls. I write postcards, often with limericks:

Reverend Kate, I truly respect her,
And I am no moral objector,
But I heard that she went
To a dance during Lent
And was caught by a rector detector. 

But the phone is the best tool of friendship. Friends recovering from getting whacked by one malady or another, the friend raising his step-granddaughter, the friend about to embark for India, the two cousins who are serious students of family history and Holy Scripture but keep the two separate.

I hit 80 and suddenly the fact of mortality made each day meaningful, a cause for gratitude. I did a show in Austin, Texas, recently, 1,500 Texans singing “My country, ’tis of thee” and “Home on the Range,” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” a cappella in harmony — the old man on stage singing bass and thinking, “When will this happen again? Maybe never. So enjoy the moment for all it’s worth.”

This is why I stopped smoking 42 years ago, why I gave up driving when I saw double white lines on the highway instead of a single one. It’s why I got a new mitral valve. My goal is to hit 97, same as my mother.

And then, on the phone the other night, it was 1959, I was 17, a sportswriter for the local paper, standing at the 20-yard line as Pete took a handoff from Gary the quarterback and came leaping over his left tackle, grinning as he hip-faked the deep secondary and galloped along the sideline and into the end zone as the crowd cheered and we spelled out A-N-O-K-A and sang the fight song as his teammates carried him around on their shoulders and that’s where he is right now, in glory.

In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio.

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