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
