Running Through the Jungle

That jungle is here. The U S of A. The conservative mind would like us to believe that we'd all be safer carrying a weapon (or at least, "feel" safer). When John Fogerty wrote (and the Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded) his prophetic 1970's, Run Through the Jungle, it was thought that, along with many of his other songs, the jungle he was referring to was Vietnam. Wrong. It was his plea, still unanswered, that some gun control sanity transpires -- here. The lyrics refer to 200 million guns -- then the population of the United States....

Run Through The Jungle

Whoa, thought it was a nightmare,
Lo, it's all so true,
They told me, "Don't go walking slow
'Cause Devil's on the loose."

Better run through the jungle,
Better run through the jungle,
Better run through the jungle,
Woa, Don't look back to see.

Thought I heard a rumbling
Calling to my name,
Two hundred million guns are loaded
Satan cries, "Take aim!"

Better run through the jungle,
Better run through the jungle,
Better run through the jungle,
Woa, Don't look back to see.

Over on the mountain
Thunder magic spoke,
"Let the people know my wisdom,
Fill the land with smoke."

Better run through the jungle,
Better run through the jungle,
Better run through the jungle,
Woa, Don't look back to see.

Now, only forty years later, there are 300 million people who could be armed, locked and loaded. Wouldn't you feel safer?

And toward that end, in Florida we have "Stand Your Ground," Yeehaw!!!

With the tragic killing of unarmed Trayvon Martin, by a "crime watch volunteer," George Zimmerman, Florida's "Stand Your Ground" provision has proven to be the gun-slinging cowboy's best friend. This NRA supported measure says "a person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony." "Reasonably believes?" Does a hooded black youth give cause to "reason?"

Life imitating art? It conjures up the Bertolt Brecht play, The Exception and the Rule, a parable for these times, in which a merchant hires a coolie to help him cross a desert to close an oil deal, but near the end of the journey, when the exploited and abused coolie offers his boss some water, the merchant mistakes the gesture for an attack and shoots him dead. He is put on trial but acquitted as the court concludes the merchant did not know the coolie meant no harm and therefore the killing was pardonable. If the one with power kills, he may do so merely out of fear. One has to be armed to have that power and Brecht saw that as an issue in class warfare.

Let's escalate this insanity further. Guns in classrooms. The Colorado Supreme Court recently upheld a state law that allows residents to carry concealed weapons, finding that the University of Colorado's campus gun ban violates the "law." Colorado is not the only state with such a law and guns are not the only "approved" concealed weapons. In some states such weapons "may" include one or more of the following: Brass knuckles, Slingshots, Martial arts weapons, Knives, Swords, Spears, Daggers, Clubs, Electronic dart guns, Blackjacks, Sand bags, Razors. Sounds like a scene from West Side Story or Blackboard Jungle. Or something out of Medieval "Fechtbuchs." Including "sand bags?" Ouch!

My old college buddy, Bruce, who was the chairman of a high school English Dept. in Massachusetts, and also a Vietnam vet who knows first-hand the consequences of brutal gun force, was stunned to read Jeff Jacoby's March 21 piece in the Boston Globe, A Safer Society with Guns

With forced logic and anecdotal statistical evidence, Jacoby happily concludes that it is OK for students to carry guns, as "having a gun makes many people — for good reason — feel safer." Yeehaw!!!

In disgust, Bruce dashed off a letter to the Globe, but as his comments are steeped in sarcasm, perhaps the Globe thought it disrespectful and elected not to publish it. Legacy media ought to rethink its policies if it is to survive. Here is Bruce's response....

Thank you, thank you, Jeff Jacoby, for standing up for a student’s right to carry a concealed weapon. We’ve known all along that such sound arms policy would only make our schools and our nation safer, kinder and gentler. As a teacher, I have always advocated that my students be able to carry concealed weapons.

Though I live in Massachusetts where the benighted populace still prevents students from carrying concealed weapons or even visible ones (typical liberal policy that ignores the need we all have to defend ourselves in the classroom—Obama’s fault for sure), I can finally hope that one day I will be able to teach in Colorado. In the meantime, I can only hope that perhaps among my students are an enlightened few, who are courageous civil libertarians, carrying concealed weapons in defiance of Massachusetts law.

I myself would like to be able to carry an M16 in the classroom or perhaps an M60 machine gun, and I dream of the day when this will be possible. To be sure, I would not be concealing those weapons but would be using my desk in the front of the room to mount the M60. (I note here that large arms carrying laws across the nation need to be changed. We vitally need to be able to carry automatic rifles and other large arms, locked and loaded. But that’s an issue for discussion at a later date.) As for myself, I could work out some camouflaging technique if we can get some reasonable laws passed for concealment. With columnists like you Mr. Jacoby leading us out of the unarmed wilderness and with, I’m sure, the backing of the NRA, perhaps all students and teachers will one day be armed.

Thank goodness for the sound reasoning of the conservative voice backed by the statistics you gave us showing reduced crime and kill numbers in jurisdictions where people can carry. Thanks for not showing statistics from other pusillanimous societies that haven’t the courage or the manhood to carry. Who would want to know that those sissy societies don’t kill nearly as many men, women or children with firearms as we do? Thanks for knowing what in addition to weapons needs to be concealed. Thanks, and thanks again.

-- Bruce Rettman

Literary Concord

Several years ago Ann cut out an article in the Palm Beach Post about Concord, Ma. and its rich literary and revolutionary war history. As we were visiting our son, Chris, in nearby Worcester, it was an ideal opportunity to push on to Concord for a couple of days, stay at a B&B (North Bridge Inn, highly recommended) and see for ourselves. We decided to concentrate on Concord’s literary history, and its place at the crossroads of Transcendentalism with Emerson as the center of that universe. To walk where Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Hawthorne walked is awe-inspiring. They were all contemporaries, living near each other. This is indeed a sort of holy ground of American literary and intellectual history.

There is no better way to start such a trip than to visit the Concord Public Library, dedicated by Ralph Waldo Emerson when it opened in 1873. In this day of the Kindle and the iPad, it was refreshing to be in a traditional library, befitting the literary community which it is at the center. Inside one can find Daniel Chester French’s sculpture of Ralph Waldo Emerson. French’s tools were given to him by Louisa May Alcott.

In the Concord Museum Emerson’s study is perfectly preserved, moved there after there was a fire in the Emerson home.

The Old Manse was home at one time or another to both Hawthorne and Emerson. Here Nathaniel Hawthorne and his bride Sophia rented for three years beginning in 1842. While on tour, we were able to see the following etching in one of the window panes using Sophia’s diamond wedding ring:

Man's accidents are God's purposes. Sophia A. Hawthorne 1843
Nath Hawthorne This is his study
The smallest twig leans clear against the sky
Composed by my wife and written with her diamond
Inscribed by my husband at sunset, April 3, 1843. In the Gold light.

One can still see the smallest twig leaning “clear against the sky.” It would have been interesting to eavesdrop on conversations between Emerson and Hawthorne as Hawthorne was not a Transcendentalist. Henry David Thoreau (pronounced “Thorough” by the natives) is said to have planted the garden at the Old Manse as a wedding gift to the Hawthornes. The garden still blooms there. From the Old Manse Emerson’s grandfather witnessed the “shot heard around the world,” the opening volley of the American Revolution on the Old North Bridge.

The Old Manse also houses a 1864 Steinway piano and I was surprised when the docent invited anyone on the tour to try it. Most items on these house tours are of the “look-but-do-not-touch” nature. As no one volunteered I stepped forward to play a few bars of Memories by Andrew Lloyd Webber, my apologies to 19th century sensibilities. It was out of tune, but all keys functioned, more than 150 years after this piano was built.

This is how life was before the “conveniences” of modern life. Parlor games and music, plays written and performed by the residents, writing and philosophical discussions, and books read to the family by candlelight. (Hawthorne read the entire works of Sir Walter Scott to his children while living in Concord.)

The nearby Wayside is now a National Park property and tours of the home and the nearby North Bridge are conducted by Park Rangers. We were lucky enough to have had a private tour of this home. Louisa May Alcott spent her childhood there and many of the scenes from Little Women were set in her memory from that home. It is also the only home ever actually owned by Nathaniel Hawthorne who gave it the name, Wayside.

The tour of the Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott actually wrote Little Women was inspired. The docent enacted several quotes from the novel, leaving one motivated not only to buy the book (once again) but others as well in the gift shop.

Alcott’s father, an educator who struggled to make ends meet, was an enlightened man, encouraging his daughters to learn, building a small desk for Louisa May (unheard of at the time), and having the pleasure of watching his daughter become one of the best selling author’s of her time, certainly making the family wealthy. That small, plain desk has been perfectly preserved. Father Alcott was devoted to Louisa May and she was devoted to him. Eerily, as the New York Times reported at the time in 1888, it is a noteworthy fact in connection with her life and death that Miss Alcott and her father were born on the same day of the month, and that they died within 24 hours of one another.

A couple years ago we had the pleasure of touring Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst. She is probably my favorite poet. I wonder whether her relative isolation in Amherst, while the literary hotbed of New England was not far away in Concord, but far enough to remove her from that scene, might have contributed to the quiet loneliness of her poetry. I am not aware of Dickinson ever meeting the Concord group.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is now the resting place of the Alcotts, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson, Thoreau’s grave just simply inscribed, “Henry.” I cannot visit such a graveyard without thinking of Emily Dickinson’s poem I Died For Beauty which I never forgot since reading it in college and in fact recited those words at Dickinson’s gravesite in Amherst:

I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our name

Our wonderful tour of Concord was concluded by having dinner at the Walden Grill with my best friend from college, Bruce, and his wife, Bonnie, residents of nearby Sudbury, and both dedicated teachers of literature. Perhaps learning, teaching and literature are in the water of Concord, Ma. and its environs!

Who wants flowers when you're dead?

A couple of days ago, my friend Bruce and I were exchanging some brief emails regarding Salinger, not for any particular reason other than wondering what he might be up to in his reclusive self-imposed exile, and then the news he died the very day we were having those thoughts. As Bruce said “Are the mystical forces of the universe visiting the readers and men of letters? I'm scared.” There is a special place in our generation’s literary consciousness for the particularly honest, direct, voice of Salinger’s writing. I remember reading Catcher in my late teens thinking how can this guy know what I was thinking?

Salinger also lived in Westport CT for a while, before we settled in that town, and some think Catcher could have been written there.

Strange to be in a world without, now, Holden Caulfield, as well as Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

“Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.” --The Catcher in the Rye

Speaking of dead, Florida is known as “God’s waiting room,” and this is no more evident than in the deluge of advertisements and mailings here about estate planning, not outliving your money, etc., but my very favorite came in the mail yesterday, the “opportunity” to “win a pre-paid cremation!” Just more “crap.” RIP, Holden.


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Waiting for someone to explain it

The global financial crisis: life imitating art? It’s hard to see the connection, but as with any great work of music or literature, we could be smack in the development section, when themes or characters, introduced in an earlier time, are permanently changed and emerge as something very different. This period in the financial crisis is being played out with the dissonance of a Shostakovich, or the absurdity of postmodern literature. As Eugene Ionesco wrote in the program notes for his play The Chairs, “as the world is incomprehensible to me, I am waiting for someone to explain it.” Perhaps we all feel the same way about the global financial crisis. It would indeed be an absurdity to conclude that after these convulsions, it will be business as usual.

But the day-to-day machinations of the market, bailouts, and politics obfuscate the possible outcomes. Are the capitalistic underpinnings of the new world economy at an inflection point, to be changed for better or worse after this economic turmoil has passed? For some insight into a speculative, but well argued bigger picture I give a hat tip to my friend Bruce who put me onto the article After capitalism written by Geoff Mulgan and published in the UK Prospect Magazine.

Capitalism, in spite of several boom and bust cycles has survived, although the US economy has changed drastically, abandoning some of its manufacturing capabilities to cheaper overseas labor, focusing on intellectual capital, and becoming more of a service oriented consumer economy. It is now just a part of a highly interconnected world economy dominated by multinational corporations. With an insatiable appetite for goods and energy, however, we’ve become a nation of borrowers, living on leverage and the largess of countries willing (still) to buy our debt.

At the same time the nature of capitalism has changed. The financial institutions that once existed to solely support industry are now an industry onto itself, trading derivatives and exotic financial instruments and, with this fundamental change, perhaps we’ve arrived at another precipice of “creative destruction,” Joseph Schumpeter's term for the consequence of radical departures.

Mulgan argues that capitalism is sure to change but will not disappear. Instead, it will not dominate in our culture as it did in the “greed is good” era. Capitalism has been adaptable but in some ways has sown seeds of its own destruction. He cites the “collapse of the savings rate—to around zero by 2007 in the US when it needs to be closer to 30 per cent to cope with ageing…a stark symptom of a capitalism that has lost the ability to protect its own future.”

Then, in retrospect, the Great Depression can be seen as both “a disaster and an accelerator of reform. One implication of [Carlota] Perez’s work, and of Joseph Schumpeter’s before her, is that some of the old has to be swept away before the new can find its most successful forms. Propping up failing industries is in this light a risky policy. Perez suggests that we may be on the verge of another great period of institutional innovation and experiment that will lead to new compromises between the claims of capital and the claims of society and of nature.”

Mulgan postulates, “If another great accommodation is on its way, this one will be shaped by the triple pressures of ecology, globalisation and demographics.” This will lead to changes away from consumption to savings and will underscore capitalism’s need to come closer in balance with nature rather than its destruction. Capitalism, in effect will become the servant rather than the master. But “it remains to be seen what political visionary will seize upon ‘servant capitalism.’ (Obama should be ideally suited to offering a new vision, yet has surrounded himself with champions of the very system that now appears to be crumbling.)”

Where today’s seismic financial activity will settle is still a black hole of the unknowable, but for an interesting macro view on the future of capitalism, check out Mulgan’s piece.
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It’s All a Mystery

We were away the last few days, visiting Ann’s friend in Tampa, Arlene, to celebrate her 70th birthday, and then my cousin Joan and family in Sarasota the next day and my dear friend, Martin (my former English professor) the following day in his new Sarasota “digs.” Meanwhile, the economic scene continued to go from mildly inexplicable to downright unfathomable during the same short period of time.

The Federal Reserve is now buying up to $300 billion in Treasury securities, and $750 billion of mortgage-backed securities using the “Supplementary Financing Program” which in effect gives it the ability to raise its own debt: “The Treasury has in place a special financing mechanism called the Supplementary Financing Program, which helps the Federal Reserve manage its balance sheet. In addition, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are seeking legislative action to provide additional tools the Federal Reserve can use to sterilize the effects of its lending or securities purchases on the supply of bank reserves.”

Then, the Congressional Budget Office claims the national debt under the president’s budget could be $2.3 trillion worse than the White House estimates. This could result in a $9.3 trillion dollar deficit over the next ten years, which would nearly double the present deficit. All this depends on so many variables that it really is impossible to forecast what they (the deficits) will be. (It is rumored that in the 1960’s Senator Everett Dirksen once said “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money,” something he later said he was misquoted on. Still this quote has persisted until recently when trillion has become the “new” billion. How long will it be before “quadrillion” becomes the new “trillion?”)

On Monday, while driving back from Sarasota, the Dow surged by almost 500 points, a Pavlovian response to the long-awaited Geithner “plan” of creating an auction mechanism for removing the toxic assets from banks’ balance sheet “Essentially the Geithner plans creates a vehicle in which private equity accounts for 3%, public equity for 12%, and the rest is provided as debt by the public sector (through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, FDIC).” The latter is from Eurointelligence, which also has a number of good links with views on this development as well as an explanation of the proposed auction formula. It seems like another excellent opportunity to privatize gains and socialize losses.

As a respite from this financial turmoil, I include a few photographs of our visit, first from Arlene’s 70th birthday party (the lady standing), her childhood friend, Arleen, on the left and Ann on the right.

Then we visited my favorite cousin, Joan, in her Sarasota home. As the unofficial family historian she gave me two photos, which I promptly scanned once I returned home. The first was taken in 1944 while my Dad was in Europe as a Signal Corps photographer. My mother is at the upper left, Joan is in the middle and my Aunt Lillian is on the right, while Joan’s mother, Marion, is seated on the left and our (Joan and my) grandmother is at the right.

The second photograph was probably taken on Long Beach, LI, in the mid 1920’s, with my Aunt Lillian on the left, then my father, my Uncle Phil, my Aunt Ruth, and then my grandmother and grandfather. I look at my grandfather and see a resemblance while my father has the same endearing smile he had as an adult. Joan and I speculate that her mother, my Aunt Marion, was not there as she was probably dating my Uncle Walter.

Enough for family history, but we concluded out Sarasota visit the next morning with my dear friend, Martin, my former English professor who is still actively writing poems and plays. Here we are in his new home in Sarasota.

Upon our return I checked some of my favorite blogs and was touched by my friend Emily’s mention of me in her “Your Blog is Fabulous” entry. Her words are humbling, particularly as I have a high regard for her writing abilities and the passion she brings to her love of literature. I worked with Emily and her husband, Bob, who is now a minister in Amish country. They were the kind of co-workers I admired the most, completely committed to excellence.

Her words made me think about why I do this and I responded in her comments section as follows: Oh, Emily, I am honored and humbled by your acknowledgement and more than slightly embarrassed by any notoriety, as my blog is such an unfocused botch of stuff. As I think I once said to you, I’ve always thought of myself as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I wish I could have lived many different lives, and among the ones I would like to have pursued, besides publishing which is the one I did out of economic necessity (but, loved nonetheless), is music (specifically jazz piano), writing, economics and investing (have always been fascinated by markets ever since I read Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind in college – a pioneering work in social psychology -- which has applicability to “the market”), photography (I think of Diane Arbus or Alfred Stieglitz as role models). In fact, at one time I almost left the publishing business as I had developed a VisiCalc (the precursor of Lotus 1-2-3 which was the precursor of Excel) template to evaluate Convertible Bonds (best if you Wiki the term so I don’t have to explain here). Sometimes I feel like Mozart’s Salieri, having merely attained a measure of mediocrity. My on-and-off-again blog reflects my incongruous interests and of course, over the last year the historical presidential election encroached as well. So, I’m afraid your readers may be disappointed by the content. You have a central passion and your blog reflects that focus so well. Your blog IS fabulous.

Finally, my friend Bruce emailed me, “Did you read the Updike poems in the March 16th New Yorker? He writes these strange unrhymed sonnets. They are at times prose but become poetry on the strength of their emotions and concision.” I had not seen these but Updike mentioned his excitement about publishing again in the New Yorker in his last interview. I had heard that these new poems would be included in the collection Random House is about to publish, Endpoint and Other Poems, and some are about his final illness. I wonder whether this collection will include his 1990 masterpiece or others will match it in its stunning clarity about the mystery of life and death:

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market -
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it; no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same
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Old Friends

It was September, 1960. I commuted to Long Island University by subway that first year in college as my parents did not want the additional expense of room and board and probably wanted to keep me at home as much as possible. It didn’t take too many of those one plus hour commutes and the emotional distress of home life to begin plotting a move into the new 16-story dormitory on campus. I took a part time job in a rug store on Flatbush Avenue a couple days a week and knew the following summer I could work full time at my father’s photography studio. Those two jobs would enable me to save enough money to cover the dormitory cost the following year.

That first year was a lonely one. No other students seemed to be commuting from Queens to Brooklyn. I was not interested in any of the fraternities, and those who lived in the dormitory kept to themselves. Between classes I hung out at the Student Union trying to study, but plotting my escape from home, which I succeed in doing with the beginning of my sophomore year.

Moving into the dormitory presented challenges as most students were already paired with a roommate from the freshman year. I was left with someone no wanted to room with, but, except for his eccentricities, we managed to get along. More importantly, on the same floor I met Bruce who was to become a life-long friend.

Friendships formed in one’s youth seem to have legs those formed later in life sometime lack. Sharing the discoveries of youth as well as some of youth’s indiscretions, without the conditional baggage of later friendships, is a sacred pact, something that allowed Bruce and I to continue a relationship later in life, picking up where we left off after occasional absences. No doubt email has made this possible as well.

We saw an iconoclastic side in one another and took pleasure in spending nights reading and writing poetry and listening to Rachmaninoff. Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven, sometimes to the detriment of our studies. Bruce was an English major and was influential in my eventual switch to literature as my major.

As a native New Yorker, I introduced him to the sensations and sins of the city, enjoying occasional weekend nights on the town, downing beers or Black Russians at bars in Brooklyn or Greenwich Village, going to dances at Barnard College, passing ourselves off as Columbia students (I used to laugh at his choice of moniker, introducing himself as Randolph Wallace III with a straight face). During semester breaks, when I could occasionally inveigle my parent’s 1956 Buick Century, I would visit him in Trenton and we’d drive around to nowhere, sometimes with other friends. We once ended up on Jones Beach in the middle of the winter, in the middle of the night, just for the hell of it.

For some inexplicable reason, our school chose us to be representatives to the National Student Association meeting during the summer of 1962 at Ohio State University, where we stayed at a dormitory in Columbus for several weeks. Bruce had bought an old Chrysler – vintage 1952 or so – and somehow we made it to Ohio and back again, the car biting the dust as we drove through Manhattan. It was one of those trips of laughter and discovery.

In Ohio we followed the billboards one day that extolled the wonders of the Olentangy Caverns. There must be a number of entrances to the Caverns but the billboard led us to someone’s house. Apparently, this particular entrance was through their basement. A young teenage boy from the family was our guide and immediately launched into the history of the Caverns like an android. When Bruce and I looked at one another the absurdity of the scene hit us and during the entire “tour” our laughter mounted while the boy’s recitation continued, which just begot more laughter, to the point of uncontrollability. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard in all my life, an experience that just further anointed our friendship.

His passion for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe became deep-rooted with me as well and I attribute my love of contemporary American literature to Bruce. I thought Bruce would become a writer of similar stature. And he is an excellent writer, but after doing graduate work at the University of Kansas, he began to teach high-school English and before he was really established in that profession, not to mention writing, he was drafted and served time in VietNam. I escaped that fate as I was already married and had a child. The picture to the left shows us with my son Chris in 1965, before Bruce was shipped off to Nam. Sometimes I feel guilty I didn’t share that burden, but at the time I felt great relief at my propitious although unplanned timing.

We drifted apart after Vietnam, with an occasional letter here and there but some twenty years after we met, we had a “family reunion,” he and his wife and his children and my family getting together in Worcester. I had two sons and he had two daughters. I was then running a publishing company and Bruce was the Chairman of the English department of a Massachusetts high school. It was as if no time had passed at all and to this day we stay in touch and occasionally get together. Following that reunion in 1992 my “old friend” wrote a terrific essay about the experience:


Old Friends

By Bruce Rettman


By the end of February, New England winter is perpetually gray. The wind blows cold, and the streets are covered with the sandy dirt of road clearing trucks. When the phone rang and the voice of an old friend sounded, it cut through the gloom of this most awful of seasons.

I had not seen Bob for twelve years and before that only occasionally, but we had been very close in college sharing a love of literature as a way to understanding ourselves and a fondness for the mature consumption of alcohol at swank bars. We were partners. After graduation we had gone separate ways and led separate lives, but still we would call each other and exchange occasional letters, and though the spaces were great, we would see each other now and then. Christmas cards full of promises to get together had flown back and forth through the years. But in the rush of life, twelve years had passed since our last brief visit. Children had grown, mine were twelve and fourteen. He had a son, now working, by a first marriage and another just beginning high school, a year older than my daughter. Over the span of twenty-eight years since we graduated, our families had never met Bob had met my wife, but I had never met his. I had never met his children, but in the middle of February gloom, he was proposing we meet for brunch in a city near my home where he was visiting his older son who ironically had settled close to me. He explained that his whole family would be there and asked if I would bring my family. "Sure," I said. "Sure."

We met at a hotel for its fancy brunch. Bob had actually suggested he might not recognize me. "Maybe you should wear a yellow boutonniere or something," he said, but we spotted each other in the lobby, shook hands with old familiarity and started kidding about hair loss. I've been bald a long time; Bob was fighting his. We were slapping at each other's heads as though in a dorm room in the midst of youth and laughter. Bob had made arrangements for the eight of us, and we sat at a long table, his family on one side mine on the other. I sat across from Bob. My wife sat across from his wife.

Bob pulled out a manila envelope filled with the letters I had sent him through the years, especially the ones I had written when I was young in my twenties. He brought out a letter written when I learned of his first wife's pregnancy. My eyes wandered over the words that expressed my joy that he was beginning a family, promising as well that I would never put myself in the same predicament. He asked me to read it, but when my eyes fell on the old words, I knew I could never read it without my voice shattering. "I can't read that," I told him and wasn't sure if he knew why. Remembering what I looked back on as the brutish insensitivity of my youth, the gentleness of these words surprised and touched me. When I gave the letter back to him, Bob read my vow of bachelorhood, and we all laughed. I put my arm around my wife of twenty-five years.

Then he offered other less delicate prose full of Sturm and Drang, dreams and posturing. We passed the letters around, Bob asking that his sons take care to read them because I had offered advice on how to raise them. When I looked down the table Ali, Ann, Jonathan and Christopher were hitting it off talking about CD's and tapes, the food and force of contemporary youth. Bob had played the piano and introduced me to Rachmaninoff and Beethoven beginning my love of classical music. Looking down at the old letters, I remembered the dorm and listening to my first symphony. Then Bob said, "I really thought you would write something important." Back there in time's summer, I thought so too, but I had done well as a teacher. Bob had made an enormously successful life in publishing, the president of a major academic publishing house.

Perhaps that explained that he had brought with him my old words and had allowed me to see the self I had once been. I became absorbed for a time in these words and needed to push myself away to Bob's wife Ann and to find out about her business. She chartered cruises and had recently returned from the Greek Isles. She and Bob had a boat, and my old friend had a new facet as a sailor.

We returned a bit to scenes of our youth--a ride out on Long Island when we stayed all night on the beach, a trip to Ohio State as representatives of our college. We remembered an old ice cream place near the elevated train where we went a few times for late night ice cream. I was moving randomly through places playing a kind of mnemonic game trying to remember the self of those old pages.

Bob pulled out a letter about a girl 1'd met, a divorcee much older than I with two children. It was full of braggadocio. I remembered the girl.

We put aside the letters and talked about the darkness of parents dying. Bob had carried on his back his cancer stricken father out of the house Bob had been raised in to take him to the hospital. I told him about being at my mother's bedside when she died. We talked about the prospect of being grandparents, and I tried to say but couldn't because the feeling was too deep that my father whom I had dearly loved had never seen my children. We talked about work and current projects. We sat there gathering in our families, gathering in our lives as though in a dusky dorm room.

When it was all over, we walked to the lobby, took pictures and said good-bye having found in a new time an old friendship that turned out to have existed in a way neither of us had understood. We had taken out an old piece of silver and had rubbed it a bit. It glittered anew, and we saw our faces in the shining surfaces. In the middle of life, we had taken heed of time's passage and had found out that neither time nor event could take the measure of love -- love of family, love of friends. In the commotion of eating breakfast, amidst the crowded togetherness of our families, in the exchange of thought and memory, two old friends had gotten to feel for a moment the force and beauty of life passing and being lived--nothing more, nothing less. Just that.