August 25, 2013

By my count it had been thirteen years since I talked to Nick. For some time he may have been my most important relationship, father and son, brother and brother, and then it was over. Met with him again yesterday down in Biltmore, and we caught up much as we could. Interestingly, he told the same story about the end of our friendship as I would have: too many affronts and betrayals, too much effort on one side and none on the other, too many occasions when he did what a friend would not, repaying with apparent contempt the gestures of love. Actually, he was harsher on himself (and easier on me) than I would have been. “I was hateful to you, so when you stopped calling, I thought it best to leave you alone.”  Therapy and marriage and a good job turned him around. He was the same Nick, with the same enthusiastic attachment to his thoughts and dreams, but this time the thoughts and dreams are sane, and the alcohol is gone. He thanked me for giving him the world his imagination now inhabits. I have a non-addictive personality, so what people who are addicted to alcohol and drugs go through is difficult for me to understand. But the afternoon was good. Even if we never speak again, a tear in the fabric of my life is sewn up again, a question answered, a wound turned to a memory. When we were in Sligo, one of the sages of McGarrigles said to Nick, when I walked in the bar that Nick had inhabited for a while, “David, here is your Jonathan. It’s dangerous for you to get too far from him.” Nick resented it, but it was right.

Reading for the Matthews Prize in the evening. Predictably, the first prize winning poem wasn’t very good, but I enjoyed the evening, and the people I met, and the effect my reading seemed to have. It’s the first time I ate at Mela without getting sick. The secret is gallons of water diluting the spices. One of the visitors teaches at Notre Dame, Baltimore, and I remembered to her the year I walked through that beautiful campus nearly every day on my way to Charles Street.

I wonder if other think that, to some degree, nearly all memories are sad.