For Len, in Friendship

“E, dopo, un’assenza di forse due anni, si trovarono a un tratto molto più amici di quello che avesser mai Saputo d’essere nel tempo che si vedevano quasi ogni giorno; perché all’uno e all’altro, dice qui il manoscritto, eran toccata di quelle cose che fanno conoscere che balsamo sia all’animo la benevolenza; tanto quella che si sente, quanto quella che si trova negli altri.”

-Manzoni, I PROMESSI SPOSI, Capit. XXXIII

It is a moment of great beauty for me – one that holds place in my memory, and in my spirit, as a figure for something more than our friendship (though it will always be that). It is, for me, also, a small, radiant figure for the very possibility of redemption, tenderness, forgiveness…hope.

You walking east on the north side of 135th Street. Me walking west. On the same sidewalk. I don’t think we had seen each other since Aaron and Veronica’s wedding. And reaching back before that, it had been still more years.

You walking east. Me walking west. And we passed each other.

And then, somehow, we each turned. Who called to whom? Did one of us call?

These things I do not remember. But we turned. And we walked back toward each other. Did we talk? I do not remember. But what I see clearly is the embrace.

*

In the passage from Manzoni, above, two young men find each other again after years of separation. Much has been lost in the interval. Death and sadness has visited. They are both displaced, lost. And they share a meal, and find a tenderness that eluded them in earlier days, because, as Manzoni writes: “both of them…had experienced things in the interval such as make men know what balm can be brought to the spirit by kindness — whether one’s own, or that of a friend.”

When I read these lines, sitting in the bath, last week (in these strange times of a modern plague), I paused, and thought of the deep truth they contained. And I thought of you.

With love, and profound gratitude, for all the tender kindness of these years, in which you have been, for me and my girls, a transformative gift. Graham