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Open Letter To A Friend
Feb. 18th, 2010 08:01 pmHey...
I heard recently you & your wife have separated... & I don't know whether to feel sorry or not. Obviously it can't be a good feeling that the romance you chased to the other side of the world has ended, but those of us who knew you were making sweepstakes jokes about how fast you'd be back while we were seeing you off at the airport. My 'bet' of a year was, I thought, generous, tinged with optimism. The ten years you've been away certainly beat a mutual friend's dismissive estimate of 6 months.
I feel I got to know & like your wife better on the trips she made back here to visit family, than when I encountered her as a nascent artist with pretensions to grandeur in the mid-eighties. I'll never really know what you saw in her, or vice-versa, but she seemed ready, willing & able to take the relationship in hand... & everywhere else. Rumour & hearsay has it that the last time any of the Australians saw you two, you were struggling to 'keep up appearances', which was the first inkling I'd had of any kind of trouble... not surprising, really, given how we'd fallen out of communication over the last decade ~ me with my sporadic, lackadaisical & then non-existent letter writing, embrace of e-mail & the 'web & your apparent refusal to engage with that electronic platform. Which, of course, makes me wonder if you'll even see this at all.
It's funny how the old gangs all fall apart... first the loose band of art students & amateur musicians of the late eighties, then the mix of Sci-Fi tragics, teenagers, flames old & new & slightly more professional (read 'proficient') musicians... without your jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none glue. I've certainly seen & felt first-hand how little I have in common with a lot of those people without our association providing the reason/excuse for interaction. We keep up varying degrees of communication, some through a continuing friendship, sometimes by accident, sometimes simply because we haven't deleted e-mail addresses or phone numbers from our records out of a sense of vielle-camaraderie. Maybe I could evoke the spirit of your old social adhesive as an excuse to chase up some of the more entertaining members of those old crowds... Or maybe not. You know how life gets in the way... & time fades away.
At the very least, it means it's been 10 years since we wrote our detective novel together & I still haven't edited it to my satisfaction. Perhaps this is the year... I'm certainly not playing much music any more, so that excuse is ineffective.
I miss your unique take on life ~ its relationships, opportunities, foibles, failures & how to navigate them with the barest modicum of style, but a truckload of individuality... for better, or more often, worse. Kind of like a map that would lead you to interesting places, which one gradually learnt to follow with caution & find one's own level of commitment... most often depending on how much red wine one's had at the time.
Physically & for the purposes of contact, I'm still in the same place as when you left. Some other things have probably stayed the same... a lot of others have changed in varying degrees of difference, experience, observance, but rarely avoidance... for which I can both credit & blame you. Fondly.
Sincerely,
I heard recently you & your wife have separated... & I don't know whether to feel sorry or not. Obviously it can't be a good feeling that the romance you chased to the other side of the world has ended, but those of us who knew you were making sweepstakes jokes about how fast you'd be back while we were seeing you off at the airport. My 'bet' of a year was, I thought, generous, tinged with optimism. The ten years you've been away certainly beat a mutual friend's dismissive estimate of 6 months.
I feel I got to know & like your wife better on the trips she made back here to visit family, than when I encountered her as a nascent artist with pretensions to grandeur in the mid-eighties. I'll never really know what you saw in her, or vice-versa, but she seemed ready, willing & able to take the relationship in hand... & everywhere else. Rumour & hearsay has it that the last time any of the Australians saw you two, you were struggling to 'keep up appearances', which was the first inkling I'd had of any kind of trouble... not surprising, really, given how we'd fallen out of communication over the last decade ~ me with my sporadic, lackadaisical & then non-existent letter writing, embrace of e-mail & the 'web & your apparent refusal to engage with that electronic platform. Which, of course, makes me wonder if you'll even see this at all.
It's funny how the old gangs all fall apart... first the loose band of art students & amateur musicians of the late eighties, then the mix of Sci-Fi tragics, teenagers, flames old & new & slightly more professional (read 'proficient') musicians... without your jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none glue. I've certainly seen & felt first-hand how little I have in common with a lot of those people without our association providing the reason/excuse for interaction. We keep up varying degrees of communication, some through a continuing friendship, sometimes by accident, sometimes simply because we haven't deleted e-mail addresses or phone numbers from our records out of a sense of vielle-camaraderie. Maybe I could evoke the spirit of your old social adhesive as an excuse to chase up some of the more entertaining members of those old crowds... Or maybe not. You know how life gets in the way... & time fades away.
At the very least, it means it's been 10 years since we wrote our detective novel together & I still haven't edited it to my satisfaction. Perhaps this is the year... I'm certainly not playing much music any more, so that excuse is ineffective.
I miss your unique take on life ~ its relationships, opportunities, foibles, failures & how to navigate them with the barest modicum of style, but a truckload of individuality... for better, or more often, worse. Kind of like a map that would lead you to interesting places, which one gradually learnt to follow with caution & find one's own level of commitment... most often depending on how much red wine one's had at the time.
Physically & for the purposes of contact, I'm still in the same place as when you left. Some other things have probably stayed the same... a lot of others have changed in varying degrees of difference, experience, observance, but rarely avoidance... for which I can both credit & blame you. Fondly.
Sincerely,
