Two friends with a longing

One of my favorite people in all the world is my friend Billy. We first met in the Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, 17 years ago.

Billy’s an unusual person as persons go. He certainly follows the beat of his own personal drummer. He’s at once eccentric and ordinary, spiritual and worldly. Only in the past few years have I made the acquaintance with his spiritual nature.

The Lord has his ways, and when Billy and I met we both were very much indifferent to matters of faith. One might say we had a scoffing attitude in those days. What mattered were good booze and good times. Now that we both sport decidedly balder pates, we find ourselves having been on a pilgrimage together. Somehow now the Lord matters a lot.

Billy and I have been great ones for pilgrimages. Hindsight helps me to identify the longing which was in both of us, longing for what we didn’t know, but thought we did. A couple of pseudo-artists-poets-vagabonds. We spoke amusedly and often of abandoning all vestiges of our former lives, of traveling to Denver. Denver! we’d say, and that would open great vague auras of significance, memories of reckless freedom and hopes for amusements and satisfactions as yet unexperienced in the human condition.

We had a longing all right, but not for Denver.

My friend Billy is not a Catholic, and I doubt he ever will be. (Who knows, maybe someday you’ll get that straightened out, William.)

Billy and I have both come to a new relationship with Jesus Christ, though, and surely that has given our friendship a whole new dimension.

I can’t describe the affection I have for my friend. My kids think he’s great and always enjoy his visits. My wife loves Billy, even though he can be awfully obnoxious. I’ve just never found it difficult to accept him the way he is, however that might be in a given year. Sometimes he is a flush high roller with a new artistic achievement under his belt.

Sometimes I worry he’s not going to make it, but he’s a survivor. He worked for a while with a Friends group in Chicago helping older people: driving them to town, doing their grocery shopping for them, cleaning their houses, tuning in to such wisdom as he could find among those he served.

No, I can’t describe this fellow to you. Whenever we meet we take up from there. Last Christmas morning he called and said he was coming in from Chicago if his car could make it. His car didn’t make it, so we got him on the Air Wisconsin. He had crafted gift packages for the children from pasteboard; one was a house, one was a pyramid, one was a book. The next day he went back home on the Amtrak. That was the last time I’ve seen him. He could show up tonight, though; and that would be wonderful.

Well, William, I would say. So good to see you. And he would laugh: a hearty, glad laugh that would send feelings of warmth to the very spirit. The kids would run to him and he would call them all by their middle names. And day would turn to night and night to morning with conversation and eating and fierce determined competition in a game.

I missed you, Tommy, he would say. I missed you, too, Billy, I would say.

Along the line I’d ask, how’s your spiritual life, Billy? And he would say, never mind about me, Tommy, how’s yours? And that would launch the writing of the latest chapter in our pilgrimage to Denver. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 15th, 1987