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My closest friend (late 1960s) was killed in an automobile accident during the summer of 1970. He was driving from New Jersey to Providence, evidently stopped to place a cassette recorder in the car trunk, and was hit on the highway. I was, at that moment, working at Rowe Camp (a hippy/Unitarian eclectic place) in Rowe, Massachusetts. I had asked Ron to join the staff which he was planning to do in a month.
I drove, fruitlessly, toward a Rhode Island hospital but was advised not to continue. Ron was now a terminal configuration of tubes, we turned around. Returning to camp, I conducted a worship service, mourned privately, never did attend my closest friend’s funeral, and, for nearly half a century, proceeded with my life. Bye, Ron.
The relationship, in retrospect, was closer than I knew when we were both 20. Perhaps that is why I could only pretend to address his death, departure and its implications for me. It all was just too painful to fully face until I learned, early this past September, that something had flipped inside of me. No longer was I the healthiest, most athletic 70-year old I knew. I would not be shooting baskets by myself at 6 am at the local park. Instead, cancer. The sharpest nurse caring for me as I spent nine days in the hospital, cut through the fog: “Put on your boxing gloves,” she said.
At Hobart College, Ron and I were perceived as brothers and I, never having had a sibling, cherished our bond. We edited the school newspaper, The Herald. One time the masthead read Ron and Fred or Fred and Ron. We were one another’s complaint bureau: personal matters, college, country, future. We also laughed hard and often made terrific fun of one another —-and predicted that each of us would make significant marks. He would become a psychologist or social worker and I, through my educational aspirations, would found a school and liberate an archaic system of learning. We also talked about the day we would come together and create our own magazine.
Suddenly, he was gone. I thought about him but confess that blocking was also helpful. It was too painful to endlessly ponder. People would ask about him, how much I missed him. I would say, honestly, a great deal and then put aside my emotions.
Ron’s younger sister, perhaps 15-20 years back, came to visit. She was a young girl when he passed on and she hoped to gain a better understanding, through me, of her brother. It was a difficult visit as I tried to recall his feelings for a girlfriend and, more cogently, revisited my friend’s character.
Ron would walk around the college campus pretending to be Quixote of “Man of La Mancha” and would loudly sing “The Impossible Dream.” He thought himself a Peter Pan figure and looked like a floppy, sandy-haired John Lennon. Ron idolized “The Beatles.”
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I led quite a charmed life: a wonderful marriage, endearing two sons, precious grandchildren; enriching careers as a professor and theater director. I’ve written fiction and now plays, and reviewed hundreds of professional theater productions.
Until Labor Day when I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. The eventual outlook, for me, is quite positive. I might navigate and, for many years, return to something of the person I was for seven decades. My prognosis is positive. Ron did not have the option.
Oftentimes sitting in whatever chair I find comforting, I imagine Ron. My loss and what might have been no longer eluded me. Thoughts rush to the forefront as I listen to my own heartbeat.
We would embark upon a project together. It’s been a half-century. Our work for the college paper was paramount. We used to stay up all night long trying to perfect The Herald and it never happened. The process was supremely joyful and our evolving partnership one for the ages.
It is easy to conjure the two of us attending a planned 50th-anniversary college reunion next June. He would drag me there and I would bring him back to the Northeast (from, perhaps, California). Once again, we could write our Herald. Could we possibly typeset it —- back to a dinosaur era? Not really. We will simulate the form and speculate about prospects: ours, the nation’s, the world. Grandiose to be sure but we were always shameless idealists.
I will surely treasure every precious moment of a friendship snuffed out long ago; but now, not so paradoxically, rekindled through my illness. A brush with mortality has its virtues. Hello, Ron.
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