A while back, I was at the dedication of an elementary school in the city where I was raised. The school was being named in honor of a deceased local political figure whom my father thought the world of. I was there as part of my work and as part of my father.
During the ceremony, I looked around and about and saw one of my father’s friends in the crowd. My father had been dead 18 years, and the man I saw was, as far as I knew, my father’s sole surviving friend, now in his 90s.
After the ceremony I went up to him and introduced myself. He remembered me, and we talked a bit. We parted saying we’d have to get together soon.
Often when I see someone I haven’t seen in awhile and we part saying we’ll get together soon, neither of us follows up to make that happen. In this case, I made it my business to follow up. As I look back on it, maybe I felt he was the closest I’d ever come to being with my father on this earth again. I called him and invited him to tour my workplace with me. He accepted the invitation and found the tour interesting.
Then I wrote him a letter saying how much some of the values of my father and his friends meant to me in my current life. If I had to sum up those values, it would be “people build character by saying no to themselves when they want to say yes, and by saying yes to others when they want to say no.” This stands in contrast to the object of life being “to do what you want to do and look good doing it,” as at least part of me thought when I was seventeen.
He responded to my letter by phoning to invite me to visit him, and we set up an afternoon for me to do so.
My father’s friend lived alone, still independent in his nineties. I don’t know how many readers have spent time with someone who lives alone at that age, but I felt a deeper stillness in his home than I’d ever felt visiting someone before. The sounds of others that once filled that space had been gone for some time, and their echoes could no longer be heard.
As he and I talked, part of my mind was on what we were saying, and part of it was on the realization that when you live to be his age, most all of your contemporaries, those you have known and those you never knew, are gone. The tune of being human stays the same, but each generation writes its own lyrics, and the songs you sang in your youth have become relics of the past. You are, as Tom Waits put it, “The Last Leaf On The Tree.”
After we talked some, my father’s friend asked me if I wanted a beer. I said a glass of water would be fine.
When he returned from the kitchen holding two glasses of water, he chose that moment to say six words, in the way the very old will say something in a matter-of-fact manner that cuts right through to the heart of things: “You turned out okay, huh, Richie?”
After a one second review of my life, I said “Yeah, I did.” Not “You think so?” Not “Yeah, I guess maybe I did.” Not “Yeah, but …” Just, “Yeah, I did.”
And then he and I moved on to talk about other things, the Red Sox and such.
After we said our goodbye, and I was a few miles from his house, stopped at a red light, I had the thought I could, if I so chose, hear my father speaking to me in his friend’s blessing on the man I’d become. I so chose.
When I got to where I was going next, I was telling some friends the story I just told you, and I found myself getting choked up.
Not too long after that, my father’s friend fell from the tree, and the tree was bare.
Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.