Visiting Lee

Saturday, I leave behind the winter cold, and a rare Seattle snow week.  I'll fly south to Southern California. 

A flight I've made often in the past, but this one has a unique feature:  I'll be spending my time down there with the two individuals on Earth whom I've known the longest.

The first is my brother Philip, whom I've known and tormented since I was three years old, ever since that bleak day in May when he was introduced to me as my "baby brother" upon arrival home from the hospital.

The second is a kid I didn't meet until three years later -- I met him in first grade -- but we were already young adults at the age of six, while Philip was still ... well, as Christopher Robin advised us, "When I was three/I was barely me."  As for my friend Lee and me,

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

And we were as clever as clever.  We may not have remained six, or wanted to, but anyone reading our past decade's email correspondence would be pardoned for thinking that we've come as close to it as possible.

Lee went on to become a chronicler of the late 1960s as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, as I've noted in an earlier post, and has published his memoir of life in those days.   As the youthful euphoria of the 1960s faded, along with our youth itself, Lee could well have faded into the foliage himself, living out his remaining days as a drug-addled guru.  It's been done, it's been done.  But, for better or worse, he instead ended up spending years as a popular columnist and reporter for the largest and best Silicon Valley newspaper (and one of the best on the West Coast).

And, not to be outdone, I myself became a ... well, you know.  Something wonderful, I'm sure, although it's a little hard at times to separate my self-image from objective reality.  If such an animal even exists.  Objective reality, I mean -- not myself. 

Once adolescence kicked in with a vengeance, and we found ourselves living a couple thousand miles apart, we let our childhood friendship quietly burn dim.  We lost touch to some degree, although Lee's activities were of such an amazing nature that he never quite disappeared from my consciousness.

And so, when, eleven or so years ago, on the eve of my retirement, Lee sent me a letter (or maybe email) advising me that he and his wife would be visiting our hometown in southwest Washington -- and asking, would I like to get together?  My bashful answer was, well, golly, gee, sure.

And thus began Phase Two of our friendship.  Mostly a literary (loosely construed) friendship, as he lives in Orange County and I'm in Seattle.  I dropped in on him one afternoon, a year or so after our hometown visit, an afternoon after which I was happy to conclude that -- all odds to the contrary -- our minds still worked on somewhat the same level.  We have, over the ten plus years since, written hundreds of emails to each other.   Sometimes on serious subjects; more often, perhaps, building joint fantasies, writing an alternative history of our hometown (it desperately needs one!) that would bewilder and irritate the uninitiated. 

Kind of weird, at our age, but hey!  That was how we related as six-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and fifteen-year-olds.  It worked,. and it works.

I'm looking forward, however, to some face to face conversation with the guy in the next few days.  Lifelong friendships are uncommon enough -- especially when the friends don't live out their lives in the same village (literally and metaphorically) --  to be worth nourishing by whatever means possible..