By Edie Everette / Herald Forum
I am contemplating calling a friend that I haven’t seen for nearly 30 years.
I thought he moved to China, but recently, on one of those free phone number look-up sites that are never free, I found what could be his landline number. If it is, he lives near my sister in a nearby town. I consider it, approach the act but then step back and ask myself, why? Why do I want to upset life’s chronology by dragging the past into the present? The present is crowded enough. Plus, after contacting him, what then?
Mister B. was a blue-eyed, petite version of Peter O’Toole. We met when I was 19 and he was nearly 40. At that young age I believed having older men dig me was cool. But such an age difference doesn’t age well (laugh emoji here). We were only pals for years, until for a spell we were more. He once gave me a giant Webster’s dictionary (this was pre-internet) wherein he circled the word ‘cool’ and drew an arrow to his name. He told me to read a page of it a day, which I never did.
Another book he gave me was the self-help book “The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Gallwey. It guides one on how to focus on the court, for example by staring at the rubbery seam of the tennis ball. I needed to overcome doubt and learn to focus on and off the court back then because I was a tennis player in the early stages of getting sober, my mind and body slowly refurbishing themselves and my spirit basically nascent.
Mr. B. liked to teach. He was deep into neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a set of methods that help a person to change the destructive parts of their life’s “map.” I had been relying on a map of what could have been Insanity Land, so perhaps Mr. B. wanted to be the NLP “Master” whose successful model I could re-draw my map from. Plus, a lot like Santa or God, he knew when I was making things up by which way my eyeballs pointed as I talked.
Now that I am closer to the denouement of my life than to its prologue (although not as close as Mr. B.), the end may be acting as a psychic bumper, bouncing me backward into the Land of Nostalgia area of my life-map. Perhaps if I see him in person, he will tell me whether I am lying to myself about why I wanted to see him, via the direction of my eyes.
Near the end of our friendship, Mr. B. had opened The Horse’s Mouth — a cafe on a hill and across from a graveyard. He named the place after one of his favorite books, a 1944 novel by Joyce Carey about an old artist fighting for recognition and against his own nature; something one could say about me.
Carey’s novel blesses us with a sublime ending: elder artist Gulley Jimson is in an ambulance headed for the hospital. Although dying, he’s laughing. A nun by his side scolds him, saying that he should be praying and not laughing whereupon Jimson looks up at her and says something like, “But it’s the same thing, Sister.”
Could I just want some more book recommendations?
Edie Everette is a writer and news junkie who lives in Index.
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