There Are No Friends Like Your Old Ones

A group of five men and two women, all of varying shapes and sizes but sharing in common the color (gray) of their hair (what’s left of it), huddled together on the sidewalk of West 92nd Street in Manhattan, staring up at the second-story window of a brownstone apartment building. There was no discernible movement or anything of interest that could be seen in that window. Yet the group stood in silence for several minutes gazing up toward it as if transfixed by some mesmerizing scene.

The scenes envisioned by the gray-haired group were all from distant memory.

"Was it really 50 years ago?" one of the gray-hairs asked.

"Yes," another answered. "Half
a century!"

That was back when the men of the group—all with full heads of hair ranging in color from black to blond—crowded together into the one-bedroom apartment on West 92nd Street where they now stood and gawked. They lived on cornmeal mush with butter and syrup for breakfast, spaghetti with tomato sauce for dinner bolstered by Chianti from 99-cent bottles, and hamburgers for lunch at the nearest Greasy Spoon on Broadway. These young men made contact with four young beauties who shared what seemed like a gigantic two-bedroom apartment around the corner on West End Avenue, and were sometimes invited there for home-cooked meals. Perhaps lured on by those tuna-noodle dinners, two of the boys married two of the casserole-cooking girls, and still were married 50 years later as they stood with the other three guys who were not as fortunate in their marriages. All of us felt fortunate, though, simply to be alive and fully functional five decades later, at an age that few of us back then imagined we would reach. Our heroes back then were hard-living actors like James Dean and poets like Dylan Thomas who died before hitting 40.

Keenly aware of our own mortality in our 70s, we have made these reunions annual events for the last three years. We’re just wanting to soak up the shared reminiscences of youth as well as catch up with current news, coming from as far south as Florida and as far north as Vermont to assemble at one of the few Greenwich Village restaurants still standing from our days of wine and roses.

Keeping in touch with old friends becomes especially important later in life, for as one gambling pal likes to remind me, "After 65, you’re playing with the house money." And you’re gambling if you put off seeing old friends, imagining they’ll always be around.

For years I had meant to make amends to a high school pal I’d left behind when I started running with another gang of guys. I resolved to call him for dinner and ask forgiveness for my teen-age social climbing. When I learned years later he had moved to the West Coast, I vowed to look him up when I got out there, but by the time I finally made that call, I learned he had died the year before.

When I went to Miami on a book tour in the early ’90s, I looked up an old friend from Boston who had gone to live there a few years earlier. Pam acted as my guide and advisor on the local scene, introducing me to popular gathering spots like The News Café on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. As I sat there in shirtsleeves one night in the middle of winter, having escaped a snowstorm in New York, I looked out at the moonlit ocean, felt a fresh salt-sprayed breeze, and fell in love with the place. The next night Pam took me to a literary reading and introduced me to the writer, who chaired the creative writing program at Florida International University. He invited me to speak at their annual writer’s conference in Seaside, Fla., and two years later hired me for his faculty. If I had not looked up my old friend Pam when I came to Miami, I might never have come to live here.

Sometimes nostalgia, pure and simple, can prompt you to call a friend and renew a friendship. Last year I tuned into a documentary on PBS of The Mamas and The Papas, the classic ’60s singing group. Hearing them deliver those songs that stirred the era, like their signature California Dreamin’, propelled me back to the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, where I lived for a year and hung out with friends on the fringes of the music business. One of that group was a writer and former child actor named Tom Nolan, who’d been a good friend at the time. At one of the commercial breaks in the documentary, with California Dreamin’ still ringing in my ears, I called up Tom to reminisce. On my next trip to Los Angeles, we met for dinner, not only reviving the past but catching up with our work and lives in the present. As we exchanged stories of our respective adventures, Tom paraphrased a fitting line from The Grateful Dead: "It’s been a long, strange trip, Dan."

Reuniting with old friends can be like opening a chapter of your life that you haven’t seen for a while, giving it greater depth and meaning, and adding another page as well. When I told a new pal how much it meant to me to keep in touch with friends from as far back as high school, he said, "Of course—no one else knows you as well—or loves you as much—as they do."

Dan Wakefield’s books include the memoirs New York in the Fifties, and Returning: A Spiritual Journey.