Published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung on September 8, 2023.
Recently for personal reasons I had to drop out of attending our 60th. high school reunion in Cleveland, Ohio. I had looked forward to seeing many of the men with whom I attended an all-male Catholic high school, St. Joseph’s. We were a closely-knit group, so to miss seeing them was difficult.
But later, in early August, I flew to Cleveland to visit family, relatives and friends for a week. Seeing all these loved ones face-to-face was an added gift, a simple but profound abundance.
This annual pilgrimage north, however, would not be complete without meeting two friends, Bill and Bob, whose friendships originated in 1953 with Bill (3rd grade) and Bob (5th. Grade) at Holy Cross elementary school in Euclid, Ohio.
In our most recent gathering, and after a few beers, Bill surveyed our long history and concluded that we had had been meeting for 19 years, and always at the same place: Muldoon’s Irish Pub on East 185th. Street in Cleveland.
The geography is no accident, for a little over a mile north on the same street, where it intersects with Lake Shore Blvd. on the Cleveland-Euclid city limit, sits our high school, now renamed Villa Angela-St. Joseph’s High School, now under major renovation.
And less than a mile east of that construction is Holy Cross elementary school where we met and attended classes through 8th. grade under the stern supervision of the Ursuline order of sisters and several lay faculty. In fact, many who attended either of these schools still live within a few miles of them.
I asked myself, as I flew home to Texas after the week of engaging with so many I love, what is the value of such enduring and endearing friendships?
Long friendships have a way of anchoring us in our evolving history. Even while we don’t communicate often between visits, we carry one another in our imagination and hearts. Affection bonds us and memory unites us in a common heritage.
If one of us hears of the passing of a common acquaintance, we report it to the alumni. These annual visits serve as ritual markers of time’s passing. When we gather, we recollect communally what we thought we had forgotten.
We speak of the women with whom we attended classes in the elementary grades, who we may have had a crush on, who we dated, and where, if known, they are now. In fact, we find that there are a host of topics yearning to be recollected. Some we never get to. Never mind; Bill and Bob offer yet another version of coming home, of being at home in history.
The intricate webbing of time present resting atop the long history of our lives with one another, as well as the depth of delightful memories, the anguishes of life that have become part of our biographies—all are somehow modified in the sharing.
Our ritual gatherings at the Irish pub, owned, incidentally, by a graduate from the class in front of ours, interlace and speak to one another. I sense that a life of abundance takes up residence right here, where the texture of our shared pasts nod gently to the shortening span of time left to each of us.
Yet within this texture of time and circumstance resides a deep joy at every annual meeting. So much when we meet needs no explanation. When we speak of our own, or the lives of others and how they turned out, what destiny they followed, we are a community of brothers who have walked a similar path in life from pre-adolescence to becoming grandfathers. And, most mysteriously, we always pick up the conversation where we had left off the year before.
Such a journey with “brothers” Bill and Bob offers an abundance that is unique to long friendships; there is no substitute for this treasured form of relationship.