No One Dies

A dear friend (you know who you are!) has asked me to write a piece about friendship and love in which no one dies. I won’t say that this is impossible for me – but it will be a stretch.

I’m at that dangerous stage – properly called Old Age, I suppose, though the phrase rankles – when every memory seems as precious as gold, at least to the rememberer, and when so many of them focus on former friends and lovers who are no longer here, either because they left, or, forgive me but it’s true, because they died. I no longer go to sleep at night with the youthful certainty of waking up in the morning – because one night, one morning, perhaps all too soon, it won’t be so. Not that I’m waiting morbidly for that morning-that-does-not-come. No, some mornings I still awake as excited as a shaken up Coke at what the day might bring. Though those awakenings are fewer now.

But at some point – a point I’ve passed – it becomes un-ignorable that life is short, and getting shorter at an unnerving rate – that there’s no guarantee of future memories. With the mid-point already far behind, and the end-point somewhere in the mist not far ahead, memories, especially those from the time of youth and vigor, are in their glory. Looking back becomes a bittersweet defense against the fears that come with looking forward. I’m not one who can claim I have no such fears – though I envy, admire – and slightly disbelieve –  those who claim they don’t.

Also, there are practical advantages in writing about those who have “passed on.” (The least I can do, out of deference to my FB Friend, is soften the blow of death through euphemism.) The “departed” can’t dispute my faulty memory, present another side to my heart-rending (self-serving?) recollection, sue for libel, don’t even complain – though sometimes their relatives do, this comment left online by one such relative, a case in point: “No one has given this Tibbits man permission to read, write, and speculate about her lifestyle.” What hot water I’d be in if the “her” in question weren’t already long “gone over!”

So a piece in which no one dies?

Perhaps I could write something about Miss Honey, my high school English teacher. There’s now an elementary school named after her in Lubbock. “Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye,” like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, but Miss Honey had never been a wife, and surely her diastema  carried no hint of the sensuality that Chaucer suggests. Though who really knows? Aside from her introduction to English classics (and her beguiling smile, of course), all I remember about her is her tale of a weekend with sorority sisters, at Houston’s magnificently reborn Warwick Hotel, in 1964 – about the same time the Duke & Duchess of Windsor stayed there too. We can only imagine what those Windsors and those sisters might have gotten up to, in the midst of the French antiques and boiserie the place was then famous for. At least one of us in her English class imagined it – though it was a chaste, and longed for, fantasy of elegance. And no one died in my fantasy.

Or maybe something about Wick, in New York City, in 1974. I met him one wild night at Le Jardin, then a place to be, especially for young, big-city deprived gays on forays from St. Louis. A son of Virginia, he was blond and beautiful. He’d gone to the right New England prep school, and the right Ivy League college. He’d interned at the Smithsonian; he had an apartment in the West 80s; he’d helped Scavullo photograph Janis Joplin. And improbably, miraculously, that night at Le Jardin he picked me.

He took me to a Fire Island beach house one Wednesday in mid-summer, for a day made to fulfill a 1970s gay boy’s dreams. I wrote in my diary afterwards: “The romantic interlude has done it's insidious magic. I've fallen in love with the romance and now, since the place and the person are so far away, the romance and the fantasy have nothing of reality to keep them in balance. In fact, the only reality, that around me now, here in St. Louis, is so overshadowed by them that it hasn't a chance.”

After a while he didn’t stay in touch much. His last card told about how exhausting all the outdoor activity was, at his family’s summer house in Northern Canada, after our quiet time on “the Island.” He never did buy the ticket to Bette Midler’s Clams On the Half Shell, as he said he would – even though I sent him the money. At least he didn’t buy it for me. I had to by one myself, the next time I got to “the City.” And I had to go to the show alone.

Maybe something about Max, my beagle. I was never really much for pets. My father was. Over the years he had a menagerie: not just ho-hum dogs and cats, but racoons and foxes, pigeons and ponies, turkeys and guinea fowl, and on and on. But I took after my mother in the pet regard, for whom animals were for use, mostly as dinner. She didn’t miss a beat when it came time to take off the chicken’s head under a hoe handle. And the blood spewing over the grass as dinner flopped around the backyard phased her not at all. But cats in the house? No thank you.

I picked Max myself, as my own dog. All the previous ones – Taffy and Smokie, and many more – had been my father’s, really, even though we tried to pretend they were mine. But Max – he was mine from the start. And I did like him: I can’t say, love. He came to live with us as a puppy when I was in 9^th grade. I was much more interested in school, frankly, than in Max.

He was still going strong when I graduated from high school and went away to college. That’s when he became officially my father’s dog. I don’t think he missed me much – Max, I mean, though maybe not my father either. I’m sure Father saw to it he had a happy life.

OK, almost to the end, and still no one’s died (except the chicken). But you know that can’t go on forever, and I bet you’ve already figured out that by now they ALL have died. I won’t dwell on it, but I won’t resort to euphemisms any longer either. I can’t help it. It’s just the way life works. Sorry, Dear Friend. I tried.