LETTERS FROM HOME: EXPERIENCES WITH THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING ALIVE

April 8, 1999

Dear Patty,

When you move back to your hometown, the places and people first encountered in your youth are seen again in a new perspective, as an experienced painter's brush reveals the source of the lines in a face. Driving through a leafy neighborhood I pass Franklin School, where at 6 years old I ended my first day of school by getting on the wrong bus.

I remember the bus driver looking in his mirror at his scared sole remaining passenger and asking where he lived. I didn't know.

Still playing in my brain are images of a game the Franklin P.E. teacher, Coach Russell, taught us. We were divided into a red team and a green team, matching a board painted red on one side and green on the other. After the board was thrown in the air and landed, one team ran away and the other chased them depending on which color came up.

Watching that board float through the air was my first existential experience. You didn't know which way you'd have to run, or whether you would pursue or be pursued.

Across the street from DC's office is another school, Trinity Lutheran. Most of my afternoons and weekends in high school were spent on the playground playing basketball, football and a baseball game called corkball. My closest friend back then lived near the school and had three older brothers. Between the five of us and their friends, there were always enough people around to form a team.

Though they probably didn't know it, his brothers were like the older brothers I didn't have and needed.

I can't remember meeting my friend for the first time. It's like I always knew him. In my mental picture of those days, he is smiling, telling a corny joke and challenging the rest of us to some kind of game.

We shared two basic teen-age boy traits. We both loved sports and girls, but girls frightened us so we spent a lot of time loving sports. We played basketball in the winter with numb hands. In the summer we rushed home after playing our own baseball games to change clothes and return to Capaha Park to watch more games. The night often ended with a hamburger at Wayne's Grill.

When it rained we played gin rummy at the family kitchen table. I probably spent more time at his house than at my own.

To a teen-age boy, a true friend is someone whose acceptance is breathed like air.

We were competitive. He beat me at gin and was never fooled by my curve ball. But it was a friendly competition that makes you stronger, encourages you that you'll be able to make your way in the world.

At one point in high school, he played matchmaker between me and a pretty blond girl. She'd talk to him, he'd talk to me, I'd nod at her in the hall. This went on for weeks until he finally asked her out himself. Somehow I understood that he wasn't trying to steal a girl from me so much as challenging the scared 6-year-old boy still in me.

I asked her for a date. If he could do it, I would do it.

Once we began college, the bond between us gradually weakened. I became enthralled with music and musical friends and was trying to avoid the future. He wasn't as perplexed, went into the Army, got married and began a family.

He became a banker, was a churchgoer who joined civic clubs and was elected to the school board. I'd run into him occasionally. He was the same: solid, happy to be wherever he was. I hoped he could see I wasn't so lost anymore.

We'd promise to call each other and play golf but never did. Playing this week, I thought of him and reveled in being there, in being alive.

My old friend died in a car wreck last week, leaving a family, friends, a church, a city heartbroken.

The best of lives take inexplicable turns. Some friends are like angels who accompany you through a passage before moving on to the next game, the next plane. The board floats in the air, green and red in the blue sky. Now you seek, now you go away.

Love, Sam