Hitting The Links: 7/21/24
Thoughts on losing a new old friend, but stick around for all the links (they make for lighter reading!), + a hike w/some turklets
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
On Losing A New Old Friend
My friend John died on Friday night. He was diagnosed with grade 4 glioblastoma in February 2023, two days after we had a phone conversation about his upcoming knee surgery and how much he was looking forward to returning to his over-70 softball league.
I met John in 2015 during a user fee negotiation with FDA. The stakeholders included FDA, a big trade association, and our two little trade associations. (Also a European assoc., but they were advisory, not ratifiers like we were.)
The user fee deal was a complicated negotiation & we formed an alliance so that neither of our groups would get squeezed. Late in the game, John could have sold me out when he got offered a great deal for his group, but he wouldn’t take it, “because we gave each other our word, and we little guys have to stick together.” I’d been raised to mistrust the world, and I’d never had to / been able to trust anyone like that before.*
We managed to ‘win’ the user fee negotiation, and kept working together on implementation of the fee program and other projects, but also stayed in touch just to stay in touch. We both ran small trade associations and could talk to each other about things we wouldn’t talk about with our member companies. It also helped that we were both Yankees fans, and he was interested in my extracurricular life/secret identity. I liked hearing about his life and family, and we’d trade stories of our demented upbringings.
In middle age, I occasionally quote Christopher Hitchens’ line, “A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can't make old friends,” but John & I became old friends.
I don’t make a lot of friends. Not real friends (as opposed to friendlies, of whom I have quite a lot), people I can have long phone conversations with. In fact, of the few significant friendships I’ve made in the past decade, virtually all of them have come via work. I suspect that’s because work creates an excuse or pretext for the phone-call, even if we spend most of the call talking about our non-work lives. (I’m trying to be better about this, but it’s difficult for me.)
John and I always had some work-stuff to talk about, but we’d veer into our personal lives all the time. When I got my CLL diagnosis, he was there to support me, and we promised then that if either of us were incapacitated, the other would help out with his trade association. Once he got his diagnosis last year, he joked, “You took the wrong side on that bet.”
Knowing that any conversation could be our last, we became more open with each other. On the second call after his diagnosis, we each told the other we loved them. (We were still too toxically masculine to do that on the first call.) He shared with me his terror at what lay ahead; we talked about medically assisted suicide and other options.
I visited him at his home in VA, about 7 months after his diagnosis. He didn’t want visitors before then, said he wasn’t ready for a ‘farewell tour,’ though he had no illusions about miracle cures. He thought he might only have the energy to talk for 15 minutes or so, but we wound up talking for 3 hours. I brought him a watercolor I made of a tree, thought it might give him something to enjoy in the last few months he had. I don’t think we left anything unsaid.
We didn’t talk as much near the end. I never knew if it was a good time, didn’t want to burden him if he was feeling out of it from treatment or the tumor. I should have done more I should always have done more that’s nothing new.
Our friendship spanned 9 years. For ~17 months I’ve been readying myself for it to end, but now that he’s gone, I don’t know what to do. This morning’s 2 pages of Emily Dickinson poems included
The Ovetakelessness of Those
Who have accomplished Death –
Majestic is to me beyond
The Majesties of Earth –
The soul her “Nor at Home”
Inscribes opon the Flesh,
And takes a fine aerial gait
Beyond the Writ of Touch.
* Perhaps I betrayed him at the end, but that’s another story, not exactly like that scene with Marlow with Kurtz’s fiancée, but close enough for me to deflect the pain with a literary reference. I don’t know if what I did really constitutes betrayal, or if the person I betrayed was really him, but I’ll carry the doubt & guilt with me the rest of my days.
*
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Maurice Vellekoop • Laura Beers • Robert Pranzatelli • Bob Fingerman • Swan Huntley • Stan Mack • Jim Moske • Adam Moss • Randy Fertel
RIP Bob Newhart . . . RIP Shannon Doherty . . . RIP Jellybean . . . RIP Evan Wright . . . RIP Cheng Pei-pei . . . RIP Renaud White . . . RIP Nguyen Phu Trong . . . RIP Sheila Jackson Lee . . .
Also, Lou Dobbs died.
Among the long TV re-watches of our pandemic era, Amy & I watched all of the Bob Newhart Show from the ‘70s. It was good-not-great — I put the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Barney Miller near the top — but he was a one-of-a-kind comic.
Lovely profile of Cory Leadbeater, who was Joan Didion’s live-in caregiver and semisorta son for her last 9 years. His memoir about their time sounds pretty neat.
Lengthy excerpt from Charles Burns’ new graphic novel, FINAL CUT, in The New Yorker. (Yes, I’ve pitched him about recording a show via his publisher; no, I haven’t heard back; no, I don’t expect him to say yes.)
Neat interview with Errol Morris, who I REALLY need to follow up with to try to get on the show.
Muppet*Vision 3D as a National Heritage Site? Sounds good to me.
You’ll have to read this link with a high-pitched voice.
GO READ this great article by Trung Phan wrote about Jerry Seinfeld, mastery, Ichiro, and a 1987 issue of Esquire. It’s a fantastic read, and you may Feel Seen by some of the non-mastery examples. When Seinfeld talks about feeling anxious if he goes 2 weeks without performing standup, I had to admit to myself that I’m sorta dreading the fact that I’m going 2 weeks between podcast-sessions. I mean, I’m glad to be 4 weeks ahead on the show, and it’s kinda neat having a weekend without a session, esp. after the past few weeks, but not sitting down with someone to record — and not doing all the prep, question-writing, and mental frame-shifting — makes me feel less human. Anyway, this whole piece is really illuminating, so go check it out.
I thought this was Gary Cole for a second. Okay, more than a second.
Current/Recent Reading
One Friday in April: A Memoir of Suicide and Survival - Donald Antrim [no, don’t worry about me]
“To me, he will be king until the day I die. He comes to me still in dreams, in all his former splendor, the terrible ruler of the basement, for insights are worthless to the subconscious; it’s like one of those boxes filled with crushed ice in which they transport living hearts, kidneys, lungs, livers, from the hospital where the donor died to the one where the living body waits. In this box, from which dreams rise in the night, dead emotions live on outside the body in which they once grew, and there among them my father still reigns.”
Or,
“How different in the case of the prawns. Alive they looked almost like office workers of the ocean, in death like a company of ballet dancers.”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard (tr. Don Bartlett, Martin Aitken), My Struggle: Book 6
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
Still getting my shit together. I’ve been feeling fat as all get-out. I didn’t get my weights in Tuesday because the kitchen reno was in its Final Day (yay!) and I remained uptight about working out while the guys were doing real work upstairs.
I had my annual physical on Wednesday, and finished up that appt. by getting my overdue tetanus vaccine, which proceeded to wallop my ass so badly the next two days that I took an extra COVID test just to make sure it wasn’t an overlapping case. Which meant no weights on Friday.
I rallied — okay, my immune system rallied — pretty well by Friday evening, but my pal & I decided to postpone Saturday’s monthly Catskills Fire Tower hike to next weekend, lest I conk out mid-hike, 3,500’ elevation. Abundance of caution, etc. I felt good enough to get in my yoga workout on Saturday, even though my shoulder doesn’t have great range. I hope to get weights in today, and maybe join The Guys for a few miles of their run on Monday or Tuesday. A few of us went on a little 2.5-mi. hike this morning, where we met some turklets & their mom. There were 4 of them, and they each had to hop over the railroad tracks we were walking along. The 4th one hesitated a little, but made the jump onto the first rail, crossed the track and cleared the 2nd one easily. We take little triumphs where we can.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & sure maybe a little profundity or something.
Keep your eyes on the sky / Put a dollar in the kitty / Don’t the moon look pretty,