Dear Marty

 Dear Marty,

We just got the text from Robin telling us about the health challenges that you are facing. A gamut of emotions washed over me in just a few moments: surprise, shock, disbelief, sadness, defiance, and empathy. It all culminated in a great sense of having left a responsibility unfulfilled, a huge sense of failure. I am writing this letter to you in hopes of fulfilling that responsibility. The responsibility is that of us never having taken an account of our long friendship. The thing is, we have a friendship that defies description, our relationship has never been one that requires us to constantly remind each other. Part of it is because we are men and men are not expected to do that kind of thing, part of it is due to our being Midwesterners Given this shot across our bow, I feel like I needed to reach out to you to talk about our friendship. I admit that this is as much about me as it is about you, so please forgive my moment of selfishness.

I just did the math and we have been friends for over forty years. Starting in that Fall of 1979 at Allen Hall, University of Illinois. Both of us freshmen, both of us lost in a massive scrum of other freshman, all looking for certainty, friends, security, and maybe someone who could get us a six pack.  We couldn’t be more different: you are Catholic, I was agnostic at the time, too insecure to admit that I was actually an atheist; you are from the Chicago suburbs, I can from the suburbs of Denver and many other stops along the way; you are one of many siblings in a massive Irish family, I am the only child of a Chinese nuclear family; you majored in business, I majored in electrical engineering; you are the loud and boisterous life of the party extrovert, I am the quiet and shy introvert who couldn’t hold up my end of the small talk if my life depended on it. Yet we bonded over the small things that all 18-year old’s bond over: beer, girls, and the new adventures that awaits us.

We weren’t alone, that little group of ours have been intact for over forty years as well, through the thick and the thin, the steady flow of time washing over us has not eroded our bonds; indeed, it has strengthened our friendship because we all know each other so well, and the initial teenage posturing have given way to the stolid steadiness of late middle age. That was a kind of a nice way to say that we are as old as F___.  I have been told that it is unusual for college friends to still share that bond over that many years. I am not sure of that assertion, but I know that this is the group that brings me comfort and most importantly, gives me the feeling of amity and friendship. We didn’t have any long-range plans to be friends for this long. It happened. I am thankful for that, but I couldn’t tell you just how we were able to hang on to each other for this long.

How we did this was through the weddings, the small meetups in Chicago and elsewhere. You and Robin introduced me to the town of Evansville. Some of the group coming to watch me coach when I was in Chicago; that took real friendship, watching their fat unathletic friend trying to get teenagers to play. I distinctly remember you bringing Chris, Liz, and Matthew to a nondescript warehouse facility to see me and my team. I also remember you and Robin driving from Greyslake to Milwaukee to have breakfast after the end of a technical conference. It was all natural, unexaggerated, and unplanned. I remember the larger group outings to Champaign-Urbana to watch the Illini get their butts handed to them in football, yet not really noticing anything else going on in the stadium because we were together we pretended we were eighteen and carefree once again. I remember my Thanksgiving during my freshman year, which I spent with Scot and his family. We then went over to see you at your house, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life”, That was my first exposure to that magic, thanks to you. If there is a movie that epitomizes the spirit of Marty, that must be it: hopeful, romantic, and of course, finishing with a  happy ending. It is no wonder that this is your favorite movie.

Of course, whenever we got together, it was story telling time, and you had always been the master at that. The stories never got old, although the details become much more exaggerated, because at our age our memories tend to add that little jolt of color. Our laughter and joy were accompanied by the indulgent smiles from the spouses and the incessant eyerolls of the children. They knew the stories forwards, backwards, and sideways: the raid on LAR; the salt in the Sprite; the time you ran away from the dorm to go study, mumbling all the while about something unprintable; the infamous shower party; the band is famous, they play at Mabel’s; the all nighter in the lounge to help you write your masterpiece on the Wizard of Oz and William Jennings Bryant, all six typewriters working in unison as you wrote and edited; and the final time you turned in a U of I assignment, sprinting across the quad to meet the five o’clock deadline, all the time screaming: Save a beer for me, I’ll be right back!

Even though the number of visits became fewer as the years rolled on, we still managed. In this year of COVID we got back together, using the technology of 2020 and the thanks to the genius of Liz: the Zoom cocktail hour. In this time of isolation, we managed to “see” each other every month. I don’t know how everyone else in the group felt, but it saved my soul and healed my mind. Seeing and talking with people who had known me for over forty years made me hopeful again, it made me eighteen again, except for the parts of me that hurt. It means the world to me.

The reason I bring up these things is that I want you to hear them again, I want the past to remind you of who we were and most importantly, I want the memories and stories to lift you up as you fight, like a true Reynold, like you had never had fought before. We can’t be there with you to cheer you on but know that forty years of us is there in spirit.

As I had said previously, we don’t say anything to each other about each other or what everyone means to everyone, but this time is an exception. So here goes.

I love you and I love our group. Fight hard, heal well, and we will see each other again, in person or on Zoom, I don’t care, just so we can be together again.

Pete