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Now and Then: Reclaiming a Piece of My Past
Out of the blue, I got a text message from my old high-school friend Abby. “Did you know about this?” she asked, and included a link to an obituary. Raymond had died, apparently back in 2020. But no, I hadn’t known. And now I wasn’t sure what to do with the knowledge.
Raymond was the first person I met on the first day of first grade. Told by my new teacher to choose a seat, I sat down next to a kid with curly hair and introduced myself. It doesn’t take a lot to form friendships when you’re six years old, but even so, it turned out that Raymond and I had a lot in common. We had similar senses of humor, we both loved Star Trek, and we both loved to draw (even though he was always better than I was). We quickly became best friends.
As we got older, we drifted apart somewhat, even though we always remained friendly. Then, in high school, we ended up in some classes together, and once again we became close friends. That was when I helped to bring Raymond together with my friend Abby, and the two of them ended up dating.
Raymond and I ended up going to the same university, and we saw a great deal of each other during our freshman year. He was studying art, and I was studying filmmaking; I think we saw in each other kindred spirits, each of us dedicated to our craft. We used to wander around town together, he with his sketchpad and me with my Super 8 film camera; I still have the films I shot, and maybe somewhere there are the sketches he made of the same sights.
But mainly, we talked. We would go for long, long walks, sometimes well into the wee hours, talking about anything and everything. Raymond naturally missed Abby, who was still back in our hometown; I think he appreciated the fact that I didn’t mind hearing him talk about her, because she was a friend of mine as well. We talked about movies, both movies we had seen and movies we wanted to make; we had a grand fantasy that someday, when I was a successful film director, I would hire him to work with me on the definitive Lord Of The Rings adaptation.
It would be hard for me to overstate how much Raymond influenced me. I was a late bloomer, physically and socially, so it was easy for me to look up to him and see someone much cooler than I was. He was my authority regarding what to like and what not to like, what was cool, and what was lame. And of course, I parroted his immature political opinions, even though I knew nothing. I just followed wherever he led, and I cherished the fact that he seemed to see some value in my company.
Sometime during my junior or senior year in high school, I had a memorable and overtly symbolic dream. In the dream, I was riding in a car Raymond was driving. But I began to feel uncomfortable with how he was driving, and started to suggest that he slow down. Eventually, I persuaded him to stop the car so we could switch places; but as soon as I sat down behind the wheel, I sped off on my own, leaving Raymond standing beside the road.
Even at the time, it was obvious to me what my subconscious mind was saying. During the last couple of years, I had begun to pursue more and more interests of my own, and had started to gain confidence in my own tastes and opinions. I discovered music and movies that I liked, and political ideas that appealed to me, and I didn’t care what Raymond thought of them. Indeed, I had begun to realize that he was quite capable of being wrong about things.
Naturally, Raymond and I began to drift apart again, as I met new friends and started moving in social groups he had no connection to. Then I heard that he and Abby had split up, and shortly after that, he left town, moving to New York to go to art school. We remained in occasional contact for a while, but eventually we lost touch.
More than fifteen years later, looking at an online directory of my high-school class, I found Abby’s e-mail address. I sent her a note, and we began a correspondence that continues to this day. Naturally, we had a lot of catching up to do; I’d pretty much lost touch with her after she and Raymond had broken up, possibly because I felt some obligation to take sides. We reminisced about the old days, and naturally we ended up talking about Raymond, who had been important to both of us.
Naturally, this made me want to see if I could track him down. I found an email address for his mother, and through her, I got an address for Raymond, who was still in New York. I sent him a note, and the next day I got a reply: “I’ve been waiting for you, Obi-Wan,” he wrote, having apparently been tipped off by his mother. We exchanged a few notes, beginning to catch each other up on our lives since college.
At the same time I was still talking to Abby, and telling her some of what I was hearing from Raymond. She still cared about him too, but of course for her the matter was more complicated. She was hesitant to make contact with him herself because of the emotional baggage associated with their breakup, not to mention her worry about what her husband would think if she reestablished contact with an old ex.
But eventually she decided to take a chance. I gave her his address, and she sent him a note; she got a reply, and he seemed happy to hear from her. All was well. At first.
But as both of us corresponded with Raymond, Abby and I had begun to notice some odd things. He made a lot of vague comments about his life in New York, but offered few details, and seemed evasive whenever the subject of photos came up. It was hard to put our finger on it, but she and I agreed that something seemed off, and we had an uncomfortable feeling that we couldn’t necessarily believe everything he was telling us. He also seemed oddly abrasive at times, in a way that was unlike the Raymond we remembered. Frankly, we both wondered about the possibility of mental illness.
The rest of the story is a bit ugly and, frankly, inexplicable. Suffice it to say that somehow, something one or the other of us said convinced Raymond that this entire thing had been an elaborate conspiracy to attack him. It was out of the blue: he accused me of having engineered our correspondence just so I could send Abby in to mess with his head. Or something. I don’t remember all of the details, because I deleted the last email I got from him, the one in which my old friend and one-time hero told me “screw you” (except he didn’t say “screw”) and permanently severed our friendship.
Naturally this hurt at the time. I’d been happy to reestablish contact with my old friend, since I’d wanted to tell him how much his friendship had meant to me at the time. Now I wished I’d left it alone; I felt that I had forever tarnished the memory of that friendship with this ugly coda. He had clearly changed and was no longer the friend I remembered, so it seemed that it had been a mistake to try to revive something that was long over.
And for another two decades, that unresolved regret sat in the back of my mind. Because of his influence on me during an important time in my life, I still thought about Raymond on a regular basis; I’d hear some piece of music and remember that Raymond had first played it for me, or I’d see a movie and remember what Raymond had said about it. And yet every time I thought of him, my mind jumped ahead to the bitter encounter I’d had with the man he’d become. It was like a paper cut that would never quite entirely heal.
Over the years, Abby would occasionally share with me some tidbit of news she’d heard about Raymond. At some point she heard that he’d left New York and had returned to our old hometown; some years later she and her family had moved back there as well, and she was somewhat nervous she might run into Raymond. (She never did.)
And now came this latest news. All we had was a terse obituary that told us very little we didn’t already know. It said that he had gone to art school in New York and had returned to our hometown shortly thereafter, but it said almost nothing to account for the last twenty years. There was, however, a single photo, the only image of Raymond I’ve seen that is more recent than college; apart from the salt-and-pepper hair, he seemed unchanged.
At first, I was at a loss as to how to feel about his death. For one thing, I couldn’t claim any actual sense of loss; Raymond hadn’t been a meaningful part of my life for almost forty years, and I had long ago accepted the permanent end of our friendship. I was not mourning, because the middle-aged man who had recently died was a complete stranger to me.
But I did find that the news of his death brought all of the old memories flooding back. These were memories I had been somewhat hesitant to explore, because of what happened later; but now it seemed necessary for me to think about what Raymond had meant to me. I think Abby was going through something similar: she and I exchanged a series of long emails in which we talked about some of our memories and tried to figure out what it all meant. Ultimately, I came to realize something unexpected.
What I realized was that that unhealed paper cut had finally closed. I will never know what happened to Raymond during the last twenty years of his life, or why he ultimately turned on me; I didn’t know that guy. But my memories are of the friend I had when we were college freshmen, and that guy I did know. He was my friend, and nothing that happened later changes that fact.
I suspect that the decades after college were not happy ones for him, and I feel some sadness about that. My mind goes to the eighteen-year-old Raymond I knew so well, a young man who was full of energy and passion and ambition for the future, and I feel sad that his life did not turn out the way he wanted it to. He did not become the great artist he wanted to be; he did not escape the hometown he found confining; and he died too young. The fact that my friendship with him ended the way it did seems, in that context, to be petty and unimportant. It doesn’t bother me anymore.
And so, paradoxically, I find that as I process the news of this loss, it has enabled me to reclaim a bit of my own past. I suppose this is what they mean by “closure.” I can now think of my friendship with Raymond, remembering it for what it was, without pain. Not without sadness — sadness is OK — but without pain. The memories are mine again, and I have my friend back.
Published in Group Writing
BXO, you never, ever disappoint. What a beautiful reflection and a testament to how life changes and changes us, too. Thank you.
We never really know people, only their reflections in our minds. But those reflections, are also reflections of us.
I sit here astonished. Change Raymond’s name to Allan, Abby’s to Della and I know this story perfectly. Some of the details are different (Allan was a lifelong golf bum rather than an artist), but… WOW!
I met Allan in Grade 5. Through Jr High and the first couple of years of HS we were inseparable – you would never see TGA in public without Allan and vice versa. Even when he started dating Della and I was the 3rd wheel we were still always together. Upon graduation, I headed off to Oregon to attend the UO, he headed to Calgary to… I guess go to college some, but mostly to golf. His family always had some undisclosed source of money. Eventually I ended up in the supply chain tech world, he ended up being the club pro for a succession of golf courses. Good for him.
We graduated in 77. Allan was one of my groomsmen when I got married in 86. Truth be told, he stole the Maid of Honor’s heart. She happened to be over at our house yesterday and we were discussing Allan, which makes this post even more ironic. I also saw him a couple of times at HS reunions.
I didn’t make it to the 30 year reunion. I was up for the 40 year, but Allan wasn’t there. I asked about him from a number of our mutual friends, but none of the rest of them had heard from him either. Somewhere along the way I had sent him a Facebook friend request and he accepted, but he didn’t seem to pay much attention to the app.
Late 2019 I was out to dinner with my wife and kids in a noisy restaurant. My cell rings and it shows “Kelowna, BC”. I know a few folks in Kelowna, so I answered it. It was Allan! I asked him how on earth he found my phone number. We exchanged a few sentences, but I was having a great deal of difficulty hearing him. I asked him if I could call him back tomorrow and he said sure.
I get home later and there’s a comment on Facebook about how I wasn’t interested in talking to him, that all I cared about was how he got my number, etc. He then unfriended me.
Fast forward to summer 2021. Someone else on Facebook posts an obituary for Allan. All I can figure out is that he was just suddenly found dead, 3 days after his 62nd birthday. Canada was totally locked down, so I couldn’t have made his funeral, even if I had found out about it more than 2 days in advance. I’m still trying to deal with the strange circumstances of our last communication. Maybe I can take some inspiration from you, BXO.
Shan Yu [sp] says you can.
This brings to mind two high school frienships. In one case I might be the BXO. In the other, the Raymond.
This reminds of my favorite observation by Otto Frank.
Having waited so long for another post by you that I’d forgotten you exist, let alone that I was waiting, made reading this an even greater joy than it would have been. I appreciate your sluggish work rate.
I suppose it might not be possible to find out anything from his mother, at this point. But if you could, would you try?
I finally sat down to Ricochet, read a few posts and then read this. I think I’m done for the day. This one hits too close to home. All I can think about is wasted lives and lost opportunities.
No words. Just wow.
I’m waiting for the day when I have to say goodbye to friends I’ve known all my life. I have three I’ve known for 60 years, one for 54 years, and one for 53 years. Fortunately, we stay in close touch my text and e-mail, and we get together periodically, most notably in Myrtle Beach in January for the NFL playoffs. That first beach trip without one of the guys is gonna be tough . . .
Indirectly, I did. When I told my mom (who still lives in my hometown) about Raymond, she offered to give his mom a call. Raymond’s mom said he died of a heart attack, and she seemed to feel that he hadn’t taken very good care of himself. She made a lot of the fact that he had been in Lower Manhattan during and after 9/11, and had spent a lot of time breathing the dust and smoke. Whether that contributed to later health problems, who knows, but I suppose it provided her with some sort of explanation for something that must otherwise have seemed senseless.
Apparently there wasn’t much to say about the last couple of decades of his life. He went to art school and remained in New York for a short time; when he ran out of money, he moved back home to live with his parents, and stayed there for the rest of his life.
For several years now I have been feeling a growing desire to jump in the car and go visit a couple of my old friends who are still around. I see updates from them on Facebook, but I haven’t had a conversation with them in many years. I don’t really expect to rekindle active friendships with these people, but I feel like there are some things that I want to say to them.
Lately this desire has started to take on a greater feeling of urgency.
Do it.
It should. Technology allows us to keep in touch frequently, but nothing beats the good old face-to-face get togethers . . .
Sounds like he didn’t accomplish much of what he’d thought about/planned. And maybe he took “living well is the best revenge” too literally in terms of you and Abby. That wasn’t your intent, of course, but that could be how he saw it, especially if he was already on the bitter side.
That is an interesting thought. Knowing what little I know about how Raymond’s life turned out does definitely make me appreciate how fortunate I am. My life didn’t go at all like I imagined it when I was in college, but I have no complaints. I suppose it never really occurred to me to wonder how Raymond might have perceived that.
And of course I can’t even guess at how he really felt about Abby. Did he resent the fact that she went on to marry and have kids while he ended up living with his parents? Did he still think of her as the one that got away?
I guess we can never really know how other people see us, or how they will react to what they see.
This post is part of the March Group Writing Theme: “Now and Then.”
There are two major monthly Group Writing projects. One is the Quote of the Day project, managed by @she. This is the other project, in which Ricochet members claim one day of the coming month to write on an announced theme. This is an easy way to expose your writing to a general audience, with a bit of accountability and topical guidance to encourage writing for its own sake.