By Joe Broadmeadow
When to the session of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past…”
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30
Given the choice between smart and luck, pick lucky.
I came to that conclusion slowly, the way most useful things arrive. Being smart opens a door here and there. Being lucky determines who is standing on the other side of it, and whether, forty or fifty years on, any of those same people will still answer when you call. Smart is a tool. Luck is a gift. I have had my share of both, but it is the luck I find myself grateful for as the years pile up.
The breadth of human experience is broad and varied. And, in the big scheme of things, this may be a minor point, but I am lucky in the way that I have benefited from friendships predating high school.
These are the people who knew me before I was anyone in particular. Before the uniform. Before the years working narcotics and the task force. Before the books and the byline.
I was the kid who played guitar solos with his eyes closed and dreamed of rock stardom. It is important to have dreams, it’s better to have friends.
They knew the boy who existed when the future was still an open field, when none of us had the faintest idea what the world would eventually ask of us, or what it would take away. To them I was never a captain or an author. I was just the kid down the street, and that is a kind of honesty no title can buy.
There is a peculiar comfort in being known that way. Old friends are the last people on earth you cannot impress and thank God for it. They remember the haircut. They remember the girl who broke your heart in the tenth grade and the car that never quite ran right.
When you start to embellish a story, and every one of us embellishes, they let you go a sentence or two before the eyebrow lifts. You cannot lie to the people who were there. It keeps a man honest in the most affectionate way possible.
Many of my class at Cumberland (RI) High School 1974 keep those connections as we inexplicably find ourselves in our seventh decade. It is a rare occurrence and one we need hold fast to and embrace.
On a recent trip to Maine, my wife and I were able to meet with Robin (Hanley) Wilkinson and Lester Wilkinson, both CHS Class 1974. (And yes, that rare bird of high school sweethearts who broke the mold and survived.)
And while on the outside we may be 70 years old, talking with them was like sitting in the lobby of the high school waiting for class to start (with the added benefit of perspective and experience.)
Keeping these connections cannot change the future anymore than enhancing the memories can change what happened, but it can remind us of how precious shared memories are to our lives.
It is why I started the Last (CHS 74) Person Standing Group. To remind us how lucky we were to meet each other, and how we need embrace each other until the very last breath.
I do not think we understood, back then, what we were building. Friendship at seventeen feels like the most disposable thing in the world. You assume there will be an endless supply of it, that the people around you are simply the first of thousands you will meet.
And you do meet thousands. But you learn, eventually, that the early ones are irreplaceable, because they cannot be replaced. No one can go back and stand beside you at sixteen. That territory is closed. The only people who hold the deed are the ones who were already there.
That, I have come to believe, is the real treasure. Not the friendship alone, but the memory it preserves. We are, each of us, walking libraries of our own lives, and the trouble with a library of one is that when the reader is gone, the whole collection goes dark.
Old friends are the second copy. They keep the record. A story that only one other living soul remembers is proof you were there, proof it happened, proof that the whole improbable business of your life was witnessed by someone other than yourself.
Call an old friend and within a minute you are both twelve years old again, finishing each other’s sentences, correcting each other’s exaggerations, laughing at something that stopped being funny to anyone else half a century ago.
There are empty chairs now. That is the tax you pay for the privilege of growing old alongside people you love. Every year the circle draws a little tighter, and the names we say with a pause grow more numerous.
I have learned not to look away from that. The rarity is precisely what gives the thing its weight. A friendship that has survived fifty years, three careers, a fistful of funerals, and every foolish thing we ever said to one another is not a small accomplishment. It is one of the few true ones.
So I embrace it, as I was told to. When the phone rings and it is a voice I have known since before I knew myself, I stop whatever I am doing and I answer. When someone suggests a reunion, a dinner, a cup of coffee to argue about a game none of us played well in 1972, I go. I have hiked long trails and stood in hard rooms, and I have learned there is no scenery, no accomplishment, no view from any summit that means as much as sitting across from someone who remembers the same sky you do.
Given the choice between smart and lucky, I will take lucky every time. Smart, I could have earned. This, I was simply given. And I intend to be grateful for it right up until the last old friend and I run out of stories, which, if we are lucky, will be a good while yet.
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