I recently framed a photo and placed it where I can fondly glance at it between bouts of internet time wastage. It shows the 1973 Cloverdale Stage Band, seventeen young musicians posed on gym bleachers to be immortalized for the school yearbook. This was about the time teenage hormones commenced steering us onto the path of boneheaded decision making.
In the year since the COVID-19 pandemic started, when I have seen none but my wife and children, the photo reminds me that I once saw these friends almost every day, taking for granted that they were a part of my life and would always be. Two of my best friends in the photo, David and Andy, are gone now, and others are just electronic wisps on Facebook.
David is front and center in the photo, the only person dressed all in white, almost ethereally pale amid a riot of color, shiny instruments, and mildly regrettable 1970s fashion.
As soon as I met David in sixth grade, we became great friends. Our mutual love of comic books inspired us to team up and create comics of our own. We taught ourselves tennis, having gleaned the rules by watching Billie Jean King thrash Bobby Riggs on TV. We won medals at Solo and Ensemble Contest playing saxophone together. We spent hours sitting on the railing at his house, crunching ice, insulting each other for fun, just hanging out.
About the time of the photo, David informed me that my girlfriend had asked him out. Thank goodness I did not have her name lovingly tattooed in a heart on my arm, although it had been a glorious 15 days and 2 hours.
David told me he was not planning to go out with her, being uninterested in girls. I told him how lucky he was because I could not stop thinking about them every waking moment. It was 20 years later before I heard what he was really telling me and understood the incredible level of trust and friendship he placed in me that day.
Last night, I dreamed of David. It was the version of David who once appeared every year or so in my dreams, tight-lipped about having returned from a secret mission up the Amazon, or having been kidnapped, anything but having died of AIDS back in 1992.
In the dream, David’s mother Dolores came home, not greeted by her deliriously happy little dogs as she had been in reality. We discussed David’s life since I had accidentally encountered him on the UALR campus in spring, 1978. At that time, he had excitedly told me about meeting a theater teacher who had known his dad, and how wonderful it was to learn more about him. When I was done recounting this real world event, Dolores was quiet, her eyes were closed and she lay unmoving on her bed. I left the room, turning out the light as I left.
In the living room, I turned to David, saying, “Spirit, it is time to go.” He stood and I embraced him, telling him how much he had meant to me, how much I missed him, that everyone had thought the world of him. He seemed happy to hear it.
I awoke with tears on my face, feeling the loss as if it happened moments rather than decades ago.
Today, I am thinking of the tiny but vibrant fragments residing within me of all the people I have known and loved. I am grateful that they remain a part of me still.
