11/25/2000
Every
year I think the same thing when I see my friends, about how old they seem to
have become, how much grayer or thinner their hair has become, how many more
wrinkles seem to show on their faces.
This is
not the definition of old we thought of when we pictured ourselves in rocking
chairs on a porch someday. Frank – who would have turned fifty-one this year,
making his official transition into middle age, had painted this moment in our
minds years ago, claiming we would still haunt each other with the same old
jokes.
How did
this happen? How did we grow old without realizing it? Maybe the others in our
little troop missed the clues, but I didn't. I caught the implications of this
moment back in 1980 when each of us stumbled over the dreaded age of 30. My
friends started acting old (at least in theory), pretending as if they had
acquired wisdom. I even caught Rick one day lecturing to one of Jimmy's younger
nephews and I knew things had taken a negative turn. I remember thinking how
foolish that change seemed, how we weren't really much different from the
people we were at 29 or 28.
This
impression only grew worse a decade later when we met at Frank & Dawn's
house – when they still lived in the Totowa section of Paterson – to celebrate
Garrick's turning 40. That was 1989, I had just stumbled out a minor bout of
mid-life crisis, and viewed my friends through the eyes of Jimmy's nephews, how
we had made the transition between that whacky bunch of Jimmy's friends to
members of their extended family. In that vision, we were to these kids what my
uncles had been to me.
No
single moment showed to me more clearly how much we had aged – especially
linked to the series of deaths had occurred in the previous few years: Frank's
father, Jimmy's father, my uncle, Harry.
In the
year 2000, it happened again.
In 1990
– when Jimmy fell over the marker that took him from his 30s to his 40s, he
grew nostalgic for those, happier carefree days of our 20s (which were neither
happy for the most part nor as carefree as he imagined). Jimmy seemed to focus
on tapes we made, silly, terrible, musical events we conducted during our more
boring moments in time. I remember him giving me a collection of some of the
sillier songs, as testimony to a time when we still sang for fun, and didn't
much care about how awful we sounded.
Bolstered
by new technology and inspired by another decade passing, Jimmy repeated his
performance this year, seemingly unaware of his past attempt to resurrect these
tapes from the past. Over the telephone, he sang their praise with such
intensity I almost believed the songs were better than my memory recalled, and
looked forward to his invitation to hear them again on the day after
Thanksgiving – when he unveiled this masterpieces for family and friends.
Over
the previous decade, we met less often, our lives seeming to create less and
less opportunities for us to gather. Although I saw Jimmy more often than I did
Garrick, and Rick less than Garrick, we made a point of catching up with each
other around the holidays.
Frank's
death in 1995 altered this pattern when we gathered in March to bury him. His
dying brought closer to home the concept of our own vulnerabilities, as it was
our contemporary passing on, not a member of the previous generation. Hearing
his voice again brought back acute visions of those times in our 20s when we
still had the luxury to waste time on such endeavors, though I cringed over
every bad note struck on the guitar and every failed harmony, and realized how
terribly Jimmy must have ached in repackaging this collection of junk, each
moment Frank's ghost haunting him in the headphones, whispering of visions that
could no longer become a reality.
Perhaps
Jimmy didn't recall Frank's predictions, of how we would mock each other in our
graying days, rocking on the same porch, saying the same sad things we invented
in our youth – but I recalled those predictions, and the saddest part of
listening to Jimmy's sad CD, was thinking how we could not shape such moments
as those recorded without Frank.
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