Seasons and Distance

Friendships in Transition

The sun was hot and the ground warmed to an unbearable heat by it and we let it radiate into our souls. Pouring back through our pores. A reverse perspiration and it warmed us through the autumn and winter and the long cold spring.

When summer came back it was never the same. Never as warm. Never as warming. Its nights drove us inside with stiff breeze and migrating insects. The wine seemed to grow foul on their porch and the smoke seemed only to fill their home.

I promise now and I promised then to not look back on those days with a fickle heart or with fond emotion. But how many of those standards have I set that I have also broken and how many of these broken things have let me fall?

Truth known, I do still miss the people the place the food and the drink. Despite the bitterness that grew in us and in those faded luxuries we did have one another and the joy and pleasure of company.

The presumption of everything lasting was fool-hearted and short-sighted but it was delicious. We did make ourselves merry with wine and our bellies were warm like our hearts.

We were vulnerable because we thought we would never have to expose our flaws, failures, shortcomings and sins to anyone else and that we would protect one another from them with gentle correction and secrecy.

It did not start with those fanciful dinners. Platters of produce and aged meats and cheeses. It started with just Jon and myself on those nights sitting by the fire cleaning our guns and sharpening our friendship. We drank expensive beer and poisoned our blood with liquor and our minds with pride.

We began as boys. We grew apart and grew into men. We met back in the middle with our wives and our children unprepared for nearly everything.

Others came along the way. Nick and his women. Brooks and Sal and their family of dogs that always provided entertainment for the kids and made sure we never have leftovers. The others had names that I cannot remember anymore. They were humorless and had blank faces except for Thad and his family but we were together for only a short time. The rest were never excluded and made good food and contributed without a word but they were emotionless and divided in their attentions. We loved them then and would entertain them now if I only knew who they were.

There were things about our gatherings that were obvious points of contention from the outside but we never did much mind. Nick always had a new girl. They were all beautiful and spoke gentle words full of grace but they were not that unlike one another and we did always discuss if maybe he should swim in different waters. We never knew what was best for him but I am not sure he did either. Tenderhearted was good for Nick at the time. If they had had hard hearts and spoke coarsely it would have broken him.

Sal was from New Orleans. Her accent had faded over the years except for when she sang. Then it was like we picked up the farmhouse table and moved it to a smoke filled club somewhere in the Quarter. Even the dark depths of her bellowing a sad refrain were impossibly feminine and they are now never far from the mind when I hear a slow drawn horn solo anywhere. Brooks and Sal were the only people of color in our group but not a novelty. Not a token admittance. They added flavor and we could not have done without. Our races inevitably separated us in some areas of life. There were things that we could not understand no matter the amount of diligence we listened with or the empathy we were able to contrive.

Brooks is wise and he coached each of us men in times of trouble. He had known trouble coming from the streets of Baltimore. He had known men to die for no reason and because he and Sal had several failed pregnancies he consoled and counseled us in hard times. From the time that he was small and his father overdosed on some obscene perversion of a drug Brooks had been training to be a father and a husband. The latter came true but I am not sure of the former yet.

That is why he and Sal had dogs though. That is also why Reuben never quite felt comfortable around him. Reuben and Sarah had no dogs and no children. He confided in Jon that he had convinced Sarah to get an abortion. The operation sterilized and silenced her. She loved Reuben unconditionally despite it and he always felt belittled by Brooks’ tender masculinity and existence.

Reub was Jewish in blood only, faithless that is. We liked having a Jew around, specifically this one because he had been brought up as a proper Jew. The guy knew Torah and was always rightly correcting my loose theological language with Pentateuch quotations that I could not have recalled with a knife to my scrotum. We knew Sarah because we all went to church together but they married because Reub was certain that he should be wed to a “Sarah” like his forefather Abraham.

Another reason he always mistrusted Brooks was because of the compassion that Sal had on Sarah. He was certain that everyone new their secret and he would grow visibly furious went he realized that he could never love in the ways Sarah needed. He lost trust in the group because one time Jon took my belt knife after a bottle of wine and threatened to slice him like corned beef which upon sobering up he realized may have been offensive on multiple levels.