Life-Long
April
30 2017
I
envy the childhood friend
who
becomes life-long.
The
rambling letters
sent-off
to the opposite coast.
The
bulging envelopes
with
their row of cancelled stamps
that
materialize
sporadically,
dropping
through the mail slot
with
a reassuring thud.
Not
at all the same
as
bumping into an old high school acquaintance
in
a distant time zone
in
some God-forsaken place;
both
exclaiming what a small world
as
you desperately search
for
each other's name.
And
not like every few days
getting
together with your childhood friend
at
some chi-chi cafe;
when
you might easily lose touch,
because
scarcity fuels desire
while
familiarity breeds contempt.
And
those long confessional letters
you'd
never have sent
and
could never have said
face-to-face.
I
guess friendship as an idea
– the
idealized friend
on
whom you can project
whatever
virtue you want –
is
more powerful than flesh and blood.
Yellowing
letters, gathering dust
bundled-up
in string.
One
day, they will clean out the attic
and
sit down to read,
cross-legged
in
the filtered light, and musty air.
When
time will have made the secrets
seem
hum-drum.
And
the final salutation
of
all my love
will
be understood for what it was;
as
true as any other,
as
essential, and right.
I'm
gratified to finally write something about friendship. There is so
much poetry about the anguish and ecstasy of romantic love; not
enough about the steady and enduring relationships that can truly
sustain us.
I
have no childhood friends who have become life-long. But I find this
a remarkable accomplishment, and something to envy: someone who
knows you almost as well as you know yourself; with whom so much
history is shared; and with whom you can be fully open, but without
the high stakes of marriage, family, sex.
I
was led to write this poem after reading the following paragraph in
the recent Atlantic (May
2017, by Meghan O'Rourke); the opening lines in an
article about new biographies of these two writers:
Elizabeth bishop, then 35, and Robert Lowell, almost 30, met in 1947 at a dinner in New York City hosted by Randall Jarrell. They struck up an unusual lifelong friendship fuelled by mutual admiration, genuine devotion, and the fact that they rarely saw each other—which meant that in their correspondence they could divulge their best and worst selves, without the friction of actual contact.
I
would very much have liked to use “ ...the friction of actual
contact”, but probably could never have written it as well as
O'Rourke!
As
a reclusive loner, I've always been more comfortable in similar
epistolary relationships. Today, of course, this means email. Which
leads me to wonder what will be left for the future literary
biographers (thinking in general, of course, since this hardly
applies to me!) Because even if emails are archived in hard drive or
cloud, electronic storage is a lot less reliable than paper. How odd,
this inverse relationship between technology and posterity: clay
tablets survive for thousands of years, paper for hundreds. Digital
media: who knows?
