There’s nothing in life that prepares you for the experience of growing older and losing friends.
Except, of course, living through growing older and losing friends.
There was an episode of “M*A*S*H” where Col. Potter received a mysterious package in the mail. It turned out to be an old bottle of cognac, willed to him by the second to last remaining member of a circle of friends formed during World War I. When Col. Potter gets the bottle, it’s because he’s now the last survivor of that group.
When you’re the last, or the last couple of people in a once-close group from long ago, it changes how you relive and share memories of those times.
We see this in how Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr approach to the Beatles’ legacy has changed since John was killed and George passed away. Whereas each of the Beatles had jealously guarded their own personal version their time together in tye years after they broke up, over the last decade Ringo and Paul have been more caretaker than advocate, as interested in George’s and John’s legends as their own.
In college, it took me a while to find, as my friend Boz put it when I saw her at her daughter’s high school graduation last year, “our people.” It turns out where I fit in best was at the campus student newspaper – as unlikely a collection of misfits and iconoclasts as you’ll ever meet. You had socialists, anarchists and Buckley conservatives all existing side by side in perfect happiness putting out the campus newspaper Monday through Friday.
Friendships were forged that have endured over the intervening years. Some remain close, others far in distance and infrequent in contact — but whenever we’re together it’s as if no time at all has passed. The friendships pick up where we last left them.
These times of formative friendships are common not only on university campuses, but also in military barracks and union halls.
While most of the time, it seems like only yesterday we were all together in the full flower of youth, the truth is that those times at the campus newspaper were some 40 years ago.
Four of us are no longer here. Doug, the eternally curious music critic, was the first to go. Universally beloved with not an enemy in the world, Doug’s far too early passing was a gut punch. We lost Brad next; kind, vulnerable, as brilliant as he could be socially inept, and passionately libertarian. Then Terry, a few years older than our immediate group: He combined cynicism and wisdom into a kind of cross between Yoda and Oscar the Grouch — if either of those characters had possessed a contagious laugh.
And now Ion. Quiet, shy Ion. A photographer’s photographer, who saw shots at events that the other photographers often didn’t realize had even existed until they started souping his negatives. As a fellow photographer put it last week while we waited for news on Ion, he and Ion were both at a high school football practice some years ago, and Ion came back with a shot of a running drill that only captured the team from the waist down. With a sunset in the background backlighting the profiles of the churning legs, it was a perfectly framed shot that absolutely captured the essence of a summer practice day.
I got to work with Ion again a few years after college when we both ended up at a twice-a-week community paper in San Diego’s South Bay community. One day, we were working on a “day in the life of a cop” feature, and so hanging out with a Chula Vista police officer for an entire shift — from morning roll call and meeting until he turned his cruiser keys in 12 and a half hours later.
During a traffic chase, while I was holding on for dear life in the front seat next to the officer as we swerved through the city’s streets, Ion was in the back seat typing up notes on the photos he’d already taken in his laptop computer — sliding from side to side of the car as we rounded each turn. The officer finally told him to buckle up.
At one point in the early evening, the officer we were riding with was called to assist other officers in serving an arrest warrant in an apartment complex in a tough part of town. I was off to the side, just observing how the officers surrounded the apartment before knocking, and asking the suspect to come out. As they placed cuffs on the man, and led him to another cruiser, Ion got off a few, quick shots (this was in the age of film cameras, so photographers were rather more sparing in how many shots they took as film stock wasn’t cheap.)
Suddenly, one of the suspect’s neighbors or friends came running toward us, telling Ion to stop taking photos of the arrest. Now, Ion stood maybe 5'6" tall, and weighed — soaking wet — maybe 105 lbs. He was, as mentioned, shy by nature with not a trace of Napoleon complex or bantam rooster in him.
But for whatever reason, Ion brought his camera down a bit, turned toward the much larger man charging him, and very calmly said, “You’re lucky all these cops are here, or I’d kick your ass.”
The incongruity of it must have stopped the angry neighbor from his charge — because it wasn’t intimidation or fear. He just kind of stared at Ion, and then the cops told him to beat it and he did.
When we got back to the cruiser, and were driving away, the officer turned to Ion and said, “Half that complex was gang members — don’t ever do that again.”
Ion was mortified and just shook his head in understanding.
It wasn’t until much later, when we were back in the newsroom reviewing the day, that we both burst out laughing at what had happened.
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Thanks. That story made me laugh so hard to bring tears.