In the time that I’ve been writing in this space I don’t think I’ve ever sat down to work without having a firm idea of what I was trying to accomplish and what the finished product would look like. I’ve come to write from anger, amusement, curiosity amongst other motivations and have always worked towards a point I felt sure of, confident I would be able to make that sense of direction accessible to the reader. Apologizing in advance, I don’t know that I’ll be able to do that today.

I’ve come to a parting of the ways with a friend of close to forty years, and the impact has been greater in intensity and duration than I would have thought. Not that a loss of that sort is something I would think of as a casual event, but the story is over seven months old now and it isn’t like me to carry this sort of thing around for that much time. I have, in the past dozen years or so, let go of a large number of relationships that date back to my college days (I’m sixty years old) without much fanfare or regret. Years pass, people change. For the most part, the majority of those connections began to lose their strength when I stopped tolerating being minimized by a group of people with whom I’d come to have less in common. Over the years my world view had changed enough to put me in opposition to the majority of them and I got tired of being casually dismissed. To be fair I don’t think holding different viewpoints was what put me on the ” just shut up, no one cares” list so much as the fact that I’d once been more ideologically aligned with them and then I wasn’t. At any rate, I didn’t want to be the guy who kept getting cut off in conversation anymore, so I opted out. No real sense of loss there, although we’ve ended up in proximity on occasion over the years, and the greetings are always a bit stilted. Still, I don’t think anyone really cares, and that feels right to me. At the beginning of the Covid outbreak, I had what turned out to be my final exchange with someone who I’d also met during my film student days at Brooklyn College. Diane and I had spent a tremendous amount of time together when we were in school and though our physical proximity to each other varied as we built our lives, we always managed to find time to stay connected in one way or another. As time passed, our friendship was tested now and again, and by the time we stopped talking, it was something I didn’t even notice as such until months after the fact. She had, for lack of a better phrase, let me down with increasing frequency, and I’d stopped thinking of her as an important person in my life. The connection between us was so frayed that I never felt any real loss at her absence. I imagine the experience was much the same for her. With Bob, the person I referred to at the beginning of this piece, things have been different.

Bob Liebowitz is also someone I have known for the better part of four decades. I’ve written about him before (Liebowitz for Mayor, The Play’s the Thing) and have made reference to him in other work that was not actually focused on him per se. We met through a mutual friend at Brooklyn College, and what began as pleasant time spent together at after performance gatherings grew into a closer relationship between us. Somehow, we found the time. We went to ballgames, dinners, and poker games. When he had a play being staged, I made my way there as much as I could. When I began this blog, I had no more loyal a reader than he. We lived far enough apart that there was no real possibility of any meeting being easy, but we did what we needed to make sure we never lost touch. As I made my way through my middle years, I came to appreciate that dinner four or five times a year and a phone conversation once a month is what a good friendship looks like once everybody starts living a life of responsibility. In the few years preceding the pandemic we’d talked a bit about working together on a play and in the months following the outbreak leading up to last autumn we had on several occasions spoken more concretely about producing something I’d written based on a short book Bob had authored concerning his lifelong fascination with the Beatles. There isn’t any way to recount in detail what happened after that without straining the reader’s patience to the tune of a breezy three thousand words or so which I could validate through any number of third parties and still probably wind up sounding more than a bit self-serving. It didn’t happen. All of this was disappointing, and because I really thought the play would eventually see daylight, I embarrassed myself by mentioning its upcoming status to more than one person on more than one occasion. A big mouth is a nice complement to operating with blinders on. We went through this dance four or five times, at which point I decided that being painfully slow on the uptake was as close to outright stupidity as I needed to venture. Last October I threw in the towel and sent him a text apologizing for pestering him repeatedly about the project when it should have been clear to me that I’d overstepped and was pressuring him into a corner. He responded by letting me know he had no clue as to what I was talking about, but not to worry as we’d get together for dinner and figure it all out. That’s how we left it and how it remains.

Part of why this has left a mark on me is simple confusion. I can’t reconcile the upbeat tone of his text to me with more than half of a year of silence. Part of it is hurt. I don’t see what I did to warrant this sort of excommunication. Mostly, it’s the sense that my future will hold even less of my past, and it already seemed thin to begin with. If I had to pick what I miss the most, it’s probably the simple pleasure of our Thursday morning phone calls. I have a fifty-five-mile commute, and once every few weeks or so, I’d call him just to talk as I slogged through the last twenty minutes. More than anything else, that time with him as I sat in traffic was, for me, a simple way to connect yesterday and tomorrow. We always had something interesting to discuss, something new that one of us was working on. Being able to talk to an old friend about more than our lives before arthritis was something to look forward to, and in turn helped me to have a little bit of hope that might get me through a day that had not started with any.

Rob is, I’m sure, still writing and directing plays. If you search his name with some regularity you’ll find him active in one way or another. Give his work a shot. He’s done enough quality stuff that he’s worth your time. If you happen to find yourself applauding through a curtain call one day introduce yourself. He’s a friendly, accessible guy and would certainly love to hear a kind word or two about his work. Who amongst us would say different. Tell him I say hello.