Outside of a few sick days, a day off for my movie-making excursion, and the recent trip to Palm Springs, today will be the first holiday that I share with the rest of working America in over three months. Happy Memorial Day!
On the last long weekend Sam and I had, we spent it with our friend Allen having lunch, hopping from furniture store to furniture store, and ending with an obligatory visit to a thrift store.
Allen is an expert in thrift shopping, having memorized the days when certain stores receive new inventory, runs specials, goes on sale. A trip to the Salvation Army or Out of the Closet guarantees a minimum time investment of two hours and quite possibly a return trip later in the day.
Sam and Allen had a falling out a few months ago, the kind that began with a minor but perceptible squabble which eventually, to borrow one of my favorite lines from Leonard Cohen, blossomed like tumors. I'm sure if I asked either of them to pinpoint the exact moment things went south, neither could wade through the subsequent muck of passive-aggression to really say for sure.
In the following weeks, they ceased all contact with each other; I, therefore, lost contact with Allen. I imagine a divorce lawyer would describe this situation as a single-property versus community-property dilemma. Allen is technically Sam's single-property friend, brought into our relationship by Sam. Though I easily considered Allen to be my friend as well, his fallout with Sam grew so quickly and in such magnitude that it seemed wrong to continue with Allen as he and I had previously done.
I, too, have experienced these kinds of fallouts, and they always began with a misinterpreted comment, a small but significant (at the time) offense. When I think back to those people I've lost, I always regret the way I let things develop, so full of indignation with a healthy mix of apathy. My friend Liz was one of my closest friends through a very important time in my life, yet she disappeared in a way that did not do justice to the friendship we shared.
I did not want Sam to look back on his relationship with Allen years later, remember how things fizzled without a proper sendoff if there had to be one, and wish that things could be different. I gently prodded him to make an effort to contact Allen, and I even sent Allen an e-mail explaining how to best crack through Sam's diligent and heavily-fortified defenses. But both are equally subborn, and I can't throw stones as I would not be thinking of Liz in the way I do now if I had been more pliant in my thinking. So weeks went by with no contact, a couple of months, I think, as I still remember the day that Sam told me of his fight with Allen, the air outside freshly chilled from a northern wintry storm system.
Since then, I've thought of Allen often. When I Project Runway'd my old Rent shirt, the first person I wanted to show it to was him, as he practically made all of his T-shirts that way, patched plain ones together to create couture. Without his example, I don't think I would even have thought to do it myself.
Miraculously, Allen called Sam a few days ago, and they spent 20 minutes talking, catching up, filling each other in on all aspects of their lives, but neither addressing the rift that threatened the very possibility of that conversation. Sam does not believe that they can return to the depths of friendship they once shared, and maybe he's right, as some things, once broken, simply can not return to unity. But even so, I believe that they did each other right. No disappearing, no fading away, no apathy.
In a Silence of the Lambs way, I felt freed from the demons of my own failed friendships and the way I let them fail. In preparing to write this post, I thought of them, remembered them all and imagined how less my life would be now were it not for how they changed me at a time when I needed to be changed.
(Happy birthday, Steve!)
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