Old Friends

 

            We have just enjoyed another major victory over Covid.   On Friday afternoon we took a Lyft into New York to meet up for a restaurant meal with a couple of old friends normally resident in Austin TX.  We then spent the night at our daughter’s apartment.  Though she herself happened to be in Abu Dhabi at the time, she was a spiritual presence at this reunion with friends whom she has known since she was a child.  Her apartment house is at the northwest corner of Washington Square Park.  On Google Maps it is identified as “Eleanor Roosevelt’s Home” though she hasn’t lived there in a while.  The restaurant where we met our friends, North Square, is about a hundred feet away, so our total pedestrian travel within the City was maybe a hundred yards.  But it still counts as a pandemic triumph.

 

            I have not read Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield since, I think, 1957 when I was an undergraduate, and it was presented to us as the greatest English exemplar  of the “novel of sentiment” and therefore something a student of literature ought to read.  I don’t remember much about it except that I did actually like it, despite its, well, excessive sentimentality.  So far as the story goes, I remember a sort of a combination of the Book of Job and the Perils of Pauline.  The novel has one quotable, or at least frequently quoted, line.  One of the vicar’s sentimental saws is this: “I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.”  The old times and old manners are frequently omitted, simplifying the phrase to old friends, old books, old wines.  This pretty well encapsulates the probably natural  conservative impulse of age.  I am not big on wines, old or new, but I make up for that in my enthusiasm for old books and old friends, and especially the latter, a finite and necessarily diminishing cohort.  Among the dearest of this group are Jim and Hester Magnuson.  Their names  have appeared many times in these essays over the years.

            We met Jim in the late 1960s, when he must have been in his later twenties and I in my earlier thirties.  A playwright and novelist, he had won the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, an award given “to artists and writers of exceptional promise to pursue independent projects at Princeton University during the academic year”; and the program’s administrators were trying to find him a place to live on campus.  I was at that time the young master of Princeton’s only residential college, still regarded as an uncertain experiment and populated largely by people with a principled objection to the “Bicker” system in which upperclass social life was given over to a number of private selective clubs and dining halls.  The college was full of individualists, odd-balls, members of racial minorities, and others united by dissatisfaction with the traditional social options on offer from the university.  We felt we were pretty cutting edge.   Jim moved into a dorm and soon was an active presence in college life.  He built a “black box” theater in the basement, wrote several plays, some of which he staged and directed, and generally became an indispensable cultural figure on campus.  His fellowship was renewed a couple of times before he moved on to his distinguished career as Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, which is among the few best MFA programs in the country.  He headed the program for twenty-three years.  There is no absolutely representative example of his own work, but for a good romp I recommend his novel Famous Writers I Have Known.

 

            He was at Princeton long enough to form enduring friendships with many students and faculty.  For us one particularly intense and “bonding” experience involved a couple of summers of hardcore camping and intense labor in the backwoods of Marion County, Arkansas, where we—my young family and a group of student friends--began building a wilderness cabin on a wild forty acres I had bought.   This plot later became by forced purchase a part of the land included in the nation’s first National River—the Buffalo.  So it now belongs to you.  In retrospect we all regard it as an epic, nearly mythic adventure.  All this antedated Jim’s marriage to his future wife, Hester, who has likewise become a close friend over the years.  She is a member of a prominent family in Mississippi.  (Her brother is a former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)  We could have used her country chops in the Ozarks.  A good part of the enjoyment of long family friendships is following the careers, at least by occasional glimpses, of your friends’ offspring.  Jim and Hester have a dynamic medical daughter and an academic-legal son of bourgeoning reputation, so that finding out the latest about “the kids” is always pretty stimulating.

 

            Our meeting at the North Square was wonderfully mellow and only slightly comic.  My daughter, though in Abu Dhabi, did not relax her Covid Watch.  New York City had just, in theory, relaxed most of its restrictions, but she had arranged that we be seated in the solitary cool of a sidewalk cabana.  We enjoyed good views both of the overheated diners within and of the chilly passers-by on Waverly Place.  This allowed us to invoke, almost convincingly,  the Goldilocks Principle of the Pleasing Mean.  We didn’t actually have any wine, old or new, opting instead for the mulled cider.  There was a certain amount of discussion of old books—and certainly some of new ones, principally Jim’s.  But it was the old friends quotient that was over the top.  If you can imagine My Dinner with André lightened up by the absence of André, you get some sense of the occasion.    A full battery recharge, so to speak.  Few meaningful meetings are all cakes and ale, of course.  It is sometimes easier to see in one’s contemporaries the aging that one is perhaps reluctant to see in oneself.  We are all on the wheel, and the wheel does turn, though slowly. 

 

            We returned, feeling replete and mellow, to our evening’s rest, followed by a jolly breakfast moment with our son-in-law Zvi and our granddaughters Lulu and Cora.  The Lyft driver on the return trip was a well-turned-out fellow, well-spoken in fluent English, perhaps in his mid-forties.  He had attached to his rear-view mirror a mass-produced rosary and a small photograph of a handsome adolescent lad.  He told us that he lived in Bayonne and that his son of fifteen was in school there.  A few times during the hour-long ride he had brief conversations with someone—I believe his wife—in Arabic.  As he was helping us out of his car in our Princeton driveway, I asked him if he were a Coptic Christian.  This question—based in a pretty simple deduction on my part--had an electrifying effect on him, rather as though I had informed him that he had the winning lottery ticket.  We had a brief conversation, perhaps the first of its kind held on that tarmac, concerning the Coptic community of Hudson County NJ and my very small knowledge (in their English translation) of the Letters of Saint Anthony of the Desert.  A few hours later I got a bells-and-whistles text message from Lyft.  I was instructed to rejoice, as I had just received a five-star rating from one of their drivers!  My first and only.  I shall never again hail a ride without being sure there is a copy of the Vita Antonii in my bag.