Then, now, and friendship

My good friend, your letter arrived today, and soothed like an ointment an exposed and aching lack of hearing from you. I have missed you, these too many years.

You mentioned that we may be seeking the same thing in our lives now, if on a parallel, like two hunters going into the woods. You didn’t mention specifics. So often it is hard for two friends to share where they are, having come from what was, the way it was.

The old days were full of the wonder of boys in men’s bodies, of dreams and self-confident goals. Someday we would write the Great American Novel, visit the peak of Everest, tour the Balkans and the Lapland tundra, discover the Great Unknown. Money would be a given. We’d be freed to hear the Muse, to stalk the hart and the nuance of language.

I have tried, how I have tried to avoid orthodoxy. I grew my hair long and wore old clothes. When the “Hair” singers sang about long, beautiful hair just stopping by itself, I had no idea they meant it quite so literally.

Discovery still intrigues me, but somehow I can’t make one. I keep discovering what others already know. My dear good friend of so long an absence (Oh, grit my teeth. Can you bear hearing it? Can I bear telling it?) I, well… uh, you see, uh, what’s happened, uh, the thing is, uh, I didn’t mean to, but, well, I have changed.

I’ve put away Balzac and Voltaire and Ken Kesey and Unamuno and picked up Author Unknown and Duck and Bear and Jack and Donald. I’d mull the great verities of the cosmos with Vivaldi and Menuhin, now I sing Mr. Froggy Went a Courtin’, and he did ride, uhuh.

You are sitting down, aren’t you? I have become responsible. That’s right. I am so damn responsible I can’t stand it. I pay the bills and mow the grass and wash the car and take out the trash and watch out for what the kids watch on TV. You are sitting down, aren’t you? I go to church.

Now I know you knew I went to church before, but what you don’t know is that I have fallen in love with God. Some admission for a leftover, beer-drinking, 1960s-reject, pseudo-intellectual, hippy, stargazing, anti-establishment, rebellious, angry young man.

Before, the days were pointless, as if they were endless. Now they are precious, though ironically they pass in melancholy like a forgotten mist.

Old acquaintances have scoffed, saying sardonically, “I guess you’ve found the Lord.” Oddly, I love them for their honesty. They genuinely cannot see a happy life without boozing and hell-raising. My nemesis now is the arrogant, self-righteous, puffed-up, religious person, the modern Pharisee. They load up those around them with heavy burdens, but inside they are rot. They make me mad. Imagine. My embarrassment is that I know them too well.

No longer do I long for the vague, exquisite insights of intellectual trivia. My challenge now is to love the hard-core self-possessed without lapsing into my own pride and condescension. God loved me that way, in that condition.

Loving God is where it’s at, my old friend. Ain’t that a kick? He’s where’s it’s always been. He’s who we seek on our parallel, like two hunters going into the woods. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on April 26th, 1987