In Praise of a Great Friend

I have a friend, R, who I've know since I was sixteen. We met in filmmaking class and formed an instant bond, at least part of which was due to the fact that nobody else in the class wanted to work with either of us. We had a reputation of being... um... let's use the term "determined", and leave it at that!

We developed an instant respect for each other, having recognized in the other this determination. Oh, and a radical sense of humor.

In fact, before I met R, my sense of humor was mostly latent. He was the first person I ever heard give voice to some of the stranger thoughts I'd always had but had been afraid to let out. Once he loosed my tongue, a world of hilarity opened to me. Not everyone was thrilled about this development, but at least R always got my jokes! And as long as I had one friend in the world who found the same things funny that I did, I was content.

R is an amazing guy. He's really, really curious about the world, not only "how things work" but "why" as well. He's an amazing photographer, proving that he "sees" the world much clearer than most of us who merely stumble through it. Not only can he capture the essence, the "feel" of the moment, he does so with images that everyone would love to hang on their walls. Balanced, colorful, beautiful, they draw you in and hold you, inviting you to linger, to breathe in, to understand.

R is a self-made man. Oh sure, he finished school like the rest of us. But he never stopped learning. Even before the internet, he read, he looked things up, the hard, old-fashioned way, in books! And of course, with the advent of the internet, he soared like an eagle. Now there was no limit to what he could understand.

Sometimes, those of us who were his friends would joke about "getting the lecture" from R. We knew that R would have an answer to every question we could put to him, and that he was more than willing to share the fruits of his labor with us, not chiding us for being too lazy to look stuff up ourselves.

Over the past 34 years, R has been my "rock." There was no difficulty I went through (and I went through a few) that he could not find some word of comfort, snatch a piece of reality to allay my fear, find some way to make me feel better.

R has also had his share of difficulties, but he's always used whatever challenge he faced to learn what he could about the world, about himself, about life.

He had an amazing business for years, which he closed in order to go back to school and get a degree, something quite a few of us in this age group did not do. It was one of the larger challenges he faced, to be sure. He needed peace and quiet to study, so he took an apartment while he was a student, continuing somehow to pay his mortgage, child support, kept up his family responsibilities including the "hithering and thithering" of his teenagers. I don't know how he did it. He would offer to explain stuff to me, but sometimes, see, listening to R can be a bit like the Star Trek episode with Nomad, "The Changeling". Nomad, you see, was this amazing machine that could absorb and send information faster than anything could receive it, leading often the to burnout of the equipment it was attempting to interface with. It often feels like that to me when listening to R. I have to close my eyes and screw on my thinking cap and remember to breathe. He thinks at warp 9, or something. And here I am, impulse drive only. I could never catch it all, one reason he's had to patiently explain things several times to me over the course of many years.

And after he pulled that off, he went back and did a Master's degree!

It is impossible for me to explain just how much I admire R. Very simply put, every day of his life, he does the impossible. Climbs the mountains, wades the oceans, never takes the beaten path, and still comes out on top. He has, to my knowledge, never once "lost."

Well, recently, I hit a wall with R. Where I sent him something that I found radically funny, something that made me curl my toes and squeal with delight, sure that there was only one person on the face of the earth who would "get it" just like I did.

Only, he didn't. He didn't find them funny. The first time, I tried to explain to him what was so funny, but dug myself a deeper hole, metaphorically speaking.

The second time was a birthday card. I saw this birthday card for sale somewhere, and even though at the time I couldn't think of a single soul who I could give it to, I bought it anyway. It was like a razor's edge. It had a picture of a shot of liquor in a glass on the front and said "A shot for your birthday". Inside, it went on something like "a cold shot of reality, hitting you in the face with the fact that half your life is over and the future holds only gloom and death..." Something like that. If you take it seriously, it's positively sinister.

It made me laugh till i peed my pants. I had it about three years, and kept pulling it out to re-read it. Because if I've learned anything from "Uncle R", it's that the only thing the future holds is opportunity. That no matter how bad it looks, joyful determination will find a way through. I've often felt as depressed as this card described, but not for long, because the memory of something R has said to me has snapped me out of it, brought the spotlight of reality into the gloom, and shredded the shadows of self-doubt and timidity with a loud "Pah!" Putting nonsense firmly in it's place.

And then I gave the card to R, and he didn't find it funny. At all. In fact, it made him feel depressed. He told me he often feels this way, and there is nothing funny about it. And that I was being a little insensitive to what he was going through.

I was horrified. It's taken me about two weeks to process this, it came as such a shock. Not just that my bosom buddy didn't find it funny, but that he was going through something he felt he couldn't surmount. That my friend R felt like a "failure."

I still have a hard time putting that word in the same sentence with R's name. I talked to Hubby about it. I used the phrase, watching his face carefully, "R feels like a failure." Hubby's face registered absolute shock. "What???!!! No WAY!!!" was his response. Because we both feel, very deeply, that if R is a "failure", then so is all creation.

R is the smartest man I know, and I dare guess he is the smartest man I'll EVER know. And not just book-learning. I'm talking about Wisdom here. And Street-Smarts. And Intuition. And Compassion. Foresight.

I'd rather debate Mr. Spock than R. I'd rather debate god himself than try to match wits with R!

And from my lowly perspective, R, you are a trailblazer, and yes, I guess it gets a little lonely at the top where you spend your thinking time. But that's only because so few ever make it to where you have arrived. I can only catch the occasional glimpse of your reality when you're patient enough to explain it to me.

You are Leader, a Great Man, an Original Thinker. And you've done this while also being a Great Husband and Father, something damned few other "great men" have managed. And you are a Wonderful Friend. And you've done all this while keeping your curiosity and humor undimmed.

As a human being, you have no equal.