I'm sure she didn't miss the irony.
…..
When I was still a classroom teacher trying to instill a love of complexity into a generation which seemed to grow more and more enamored of the obvious and uncomplicated, pretty much like me thirty-five years ago, I liked to tweak my students with Emerson's aphorisms—they used to like the ones about consistency and nonconformity, but deeper into this century the kids became more suspicious of those qualities. Too bad: those are the only years you can practice an inconsistent non-conformity without losing your job or your family. But even when the kids all insisted on having the same smartphone, they bought into Emerson's definition of friendship, and I always encouraged—or more frequently badgered—my students to comment on it.
After all, they had friends and best friends and BFFs. They had boyfriends, girlfriends, school friends, and Facebook friends. Even though I knew that among many of them there was depth of thought that informed all that they did, there was also an ongoing vacuity that denied serious discussion. So every year, at least once, I'd come into class early and write this on the board:
Almost every man we meet requires some civility, — requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.
The words always engendered some valid discussions, even some profound writing, but it remained a theoretical teaching tool until I went west and actually lost someone whom I might never have considered a friend but who, in fact, fit Emerson's definition more precisely than I'd imagined. His death is not the only event I recount when someone asks about my experiences in the mountains, but when I settled back in to the flat lands of the New England shore, it seemed to dominate every conversation.
Sometimes they wanted to know what it was like to cut all the cords and kiss off everything, but it was never that bold or romantic. It was hardly even an escape, more like a hiatus—to utilize a vocabulary word I taught year after year to kids who would probably never use it. A gap. An interval between occurrences. A hiatus then. Maybe there's a book in it:
My Hiatus in the West by Calvin Hopper
The title doesn't exactly shout excitement, but for me there was some: there always is when you think you're in love, even more so when that love and salvation are somehow mated. And even when it proves to be a false hope and the letdown is twice as painful, there are always former colleagues to commiserate, to remind me—because I taught literature—'Tis better to have loved and lost, etc. I'd like to respond that such bullshit wasn't true when Tennyson wrote it and it's not true today. But I'm not that convinced.
As for losing a friend, that's only the summary—it's what I tell people when they ask. If they require more, I fill in the details—right down to the time of day, the weather, those who saw him last, what he said, where he was going. I seldom provide the name because it means so little—just an identifier we all have stamped on our licenses, written in the papers to announce our birth, our accomplishments, our failures, and our deaths before it is finally etched on our tombstones.
It was a hit-and-run I tell them, a coward's crime, and they respond with predictable outrage: drivers like that should be tortured, or imprisoned, or if I'm in a bar somewhere with drunken friends, castrated. They want to know about arrest and prosecution, and I tell them that those things don't matter after the damage has been done, and most times we seamlessly glide to another story—maybe someone else's—and mine becomes another tale muttered over a few beers and buried in the following day's hangover.
He died last November. It's June now. A full year since I've taught a class, seven months since I arrived in Sage, and hardly more than six months since that Thanksgiving night when my friend Walter Trucks stepped onto a snow-packed street for the last time. The missing chronology of childhood years has not spread to adulthood: that calendar is locked in. Six months—not very long in the grieving process, I suppose, but he wasn't someone I'd known all my life, or whom I had gone through bad times with, or who had stood up for me at my wedding, or been a pal to my kids or helped me move furniture or all those other things that males do together to prove they've sufficiently bonded. And he wasn't the secret lover who allowed me to escape the sham of heterosexuality. (If it is a sham, I remain unsuccessfully immersed.) He wasn't any of those. I knew him for a month before he died—hardly long enough to remember someone's name as he flits across social media these days, let alone agonize over his loss. But still his death eats away at me. His murder.
If he had lived, I doubt if he'd have been more than a bit player in the little drama that occurred afterwards, that occupied one measly half year out of the hundred-odd half-years I've lived. That's a convoluted way of saying I'm fifty: Walter would have given me shit for couching my age in a math riddle. He was more plain-spoken than that. There were other players besides Walter who suffered too, who lost if not their lives at least their peace of mind, who fell into such depths of despair that existence itself seemed untenable; and yet most of them navigated some pathway out, even achieved—if you believe in that kind of thing—a modicum of salvation. I'm not sure yet if I reside in that category—the jury is still out—but I wish Walter Trucks had gotten that chance.
So here I am using a friend's death as a launching point for some story about me. I'm no more sensitive or empathetic—no more a friend to him I guess—than those well-intentioned listeners in the break room or the bar or the holiday gathering who seem to be listening attentively only to pounce on the briefest lull to blurt out "…that reminds me of" ...and so on. I don't want to be that person, but it does remind me.
Chapter 2
The buildings in Sage, instead of connecting into some whole, seemed set apart from each other by little alleys and passageways, as if each were suffering from some malignancy requiring quarantine. Here and there a light would reflect upwards from a large puddle and show each building in duplicate; and I thought of Edgar Allan Poe, the American writer who often employed multiple images and reflections to create horrors that were greater than the sum of their parts. I didn't think the architecture of Sage masked repulsive concepts like incest or living entombment or obsessive murders (even with the cat interment fresh in my mind), but I never really understood that Poe theory until I saw Sage.
I was not horrified, and despite what would occur in the weeks and months to come, I did not attach any macabre qualities to the place. In fact I'd have been better off thinking of the artist Edward Hopper, and not just because we share the same last name. Actually he and I share a connection. My late uncle Teddy met him once back in the fifties—found him shopping at some hardware store in Eastham. I guess they got to talking—it must have been a sight: my uncle had one of those stoic and angular faces you see in Hopper's paintings, and Hopper himself who actually was the stoic and angular guy in the paintings. Somehow they found a family link, something slightly more significant than the usual six degrees; and ever since I learned that, I've developed an appreciation for the isolation the artist conveyed in his work. I wasn't sure I was going to appreciate the isolation of Sage with as much fervor.
This particular faux-Hopper landscape lacked, among other amenities, a bus depot: Sage would be just as likely to have a planetarium or a Ferris wheel, especially since any convenience store with an Internet connection can distribute schedules and print and sell tickets these days. Where I grew up those activities had been relegated to a somewhat disreputable and forbidding "tobacco shop" over in Hyannis—one that sold girlie magazines to adults in a back room behind the back room, the first back room being filled mostly with curious teenagers waiting to get thrown out by the owner who was fond of reminding them that "this is not a library." If only it had been, research would have been a lot less tiresome.
I wasn't sure if Sage even had a tobacco shop, and Internet porn had pretty much obviated the need for any back rooms. But the town did have a kiosk, and I don't mean one of those annoying little shacks in the mall selling garish jewelry and phone cases and horrid art prints. This particular kiosk, seemingly built of scrap lumber and one abundantly caulked sheet of smoked,