Losing a Friend
Friends drift into and out of our lives all the time. I, in particular, am very aware of this phenomenon since I spent most of my early life moving from one locale to another as a trailing child to a globetrotting mother. My early years were spent in the tropics of Venezuela and Costa Rica with an interregnum in such different places as Santa Monica and Ithaca. That more or less took me through age six. The next five years were my Midwest years spent in the depths of Wisconsin with my mother getting her graduate degrees and me acquiring a grade school education, an appreciation for intensive Americana, and an understanding that schoolyard buddies come and go. It was during those five years that I was forced to skip a grade and leave behind one set of chums and try to fit in with another. We also split that time living in one neighborhood in a crackerbox rental and then moving to a purchased home in a better neighborhood (compliments of a small inheritance from my grandfather’s death), all requiring me to abandon one set of friends and find new ones. Then, just as that started to settle in, we moved to rural Maine from the comfort of suburban Madison and the change in local people profiles could not have been more stark. Maine is the northern tip of Appalachia and the country folk in our broadened rural setting (we were two miles from my grade school and the nearest bottle of milk with nothing but pine trees in between) were woodsmen who did not think of things like graduate school or even college. It was so very provincial that my mother felt it was important to remove me from its grip and send me to a nearby prep school to surround me with more like-minded kids who had their sights set on higher education among other things. After just one year of Hebron Academy, I was yanked out to move overseas to Rome, Italy and a far more global coterie of friends that completed the opening of my eyes to the much wider world that existed in a cosmopolitan enclave like the expat community of Rome.
The first stop on this childhood train from which I actually retained several friendships over the years was from that time at Notre Dame International School in Rome. There I at least had three years to forge some relationships even though the bulk of the schoolmates were also from very transient families that often came and went with the ease of foreign diplomats and wandering businesspeople. The bond that was most strongly formed revolved around what would become a lifelong passion of motorcycling. And then, it was off to college for what amounted to five years once again in a relatively rural community in Ithaca, New York. But unlike Maine, there was nothing provincial about Ithaca. With a large and very globally focused and sophisticated institution of higher learning in Cornell, I was finally able to imbed myself with a coterie of lifelong friends with whom I had the time to develop strong ties.
Even though the proverbial freshman dorm became a diaspora into the various living accommodations of the upperclassman life, seventeen of us moved into the same fraternity, so there was a certain continuity despite the collegiate living fluidity. A smaller group of six of us then moved into a senior year apartment together and those bonds became the strongest of them all. There are five of us from that grouping that have survived the rigors of adulthood and made it to our seventies and I am glad to say that we are all still good friends. We may not see each other very often, but there is a shared history that binds us. The sad friend story, besides the one housemate that took his own life a few years ago after contracting a debilitating nerve disease that rendered his unable to enjoy his life, is the story of my best friend in college, Paul. Paul was a fraternity brother that marched very much to the beat of his own drum. He was the only person I knew who came to college with a subscription to Business Week in 1971 and he knew exactly what’s he wanted out of Cornell. He wanted to get a BS/MBA degree in finance and then go on to become a corporate CEO. This was long before any of us even knew what CEO stood for.
After one year in the fraternity, Paul married his childhood sweetheart. He and she had met in the nearby community of Trumansburg where her family was from and where Paul and his family had moved a few years prior. Paul hated to be “from” Trumansburg because as the son of a West Point graduate career Army officer, he too had moved all over the world during his young life. Paul and I became fast friends by virtue of our common study of economics. It was Paul that convinced me to go to business school and join him there for a year of graduate work. In many ways, it was Paul’s extreme vocational focus that took me out of my wandering educational survey mode near the end of my undergraduate career. In many ways, I owe much of my career and financial success to Paul since I’m not sure I would have ever considered business school had I not been sold the notion so strongly by him. Paul and his wife, Ann were my best friends for the last two years of undergraduate and one year of graduate school. In a strange way, their mock married home life was the closest thing I had ever experienced like a normal family life at that point.
Unfortunately, Paul’s marriage ended with graduate school, literally dissolving to nothing over the course of one long spring weekend. He went off to find his fortune at Xerox Corporation, deciding that learning to be an ace salesman was the best road to the C-Suite. He remarried unsuccessfully (though he did get two daughters out of the deal) and didn’t do much better with his career. It seemed that Paul was afflicted with a bipolar condition that sent him into long bouts of depression. There had been clues during college that he had an unusual psychological make-up, like the fact that he could not bring himself to do menial tasks and was only happy when focusing on high level strategic issues. That can be a fine attribute in higher management, but the early career years are usually driven by less strategic and more menial tasks done well and repetitively. That was not Paul’s forte. Paul and I also had a traumatic business problem that caused him to tear our relationship in a way that never allowed it to be the same again. Paul remarried a third time but that did not last either and eventually Paul died young of a condition perhaps related to all the brain chemical drugs he was forced to take over the years. I remained close to and helpful to his estranged third wife because I genuinely liked her.
I actually helped cajole her into a relationship with another widower friend. That has eventually turned into a marriage which one would imagine has strong friendship roots for me on both sides. But something has come undone and I cannot, for the life of me understand it. Apparently I said something deeply off-putting to her and despite years of friendship with both her and her husband, she has chosen to distance herself from me and Kim. Neither of us can recall what was said and even though I am certain no ill will was intended, she will not relent or even tell us the basis of the upset. We can both feel that she is drifting away from us and I feel as though I am once again losing a friend. I know that life has many twists and turns and that friends come and go, but at this stage of life I do not like losing a friend for inexplicable reasons. It may be clear to her why I am no longer a worthy friend, but it still a mystery to me. I can only hope that something changes.