This column first appeared in May 2022.
“You have good friends,” my mother said to me, shortly before she died. She was in a hospice in Maryland, and I had traveled from St Louis Missouri to visit her. On that day, our reminiscences were specifically about one of my friends who, on her journey with her husband from Australia back to the United States, stopped in my hometown, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, to visit the Andy Warhol museum. I had sung at the friend’s wedding and acquired her husband as another friend. And they made an effort to visit my mother. Somewhere in the pile of photos I have is a picture of my friend sitting on the couch with my mother.
“Everybody needs a friend…”
Michael Franti wrote and sang a song about friendship with the words, “Anytime, anytime you want me … I’ll walk right back over again … To you, my friend, to you.” I sing a song to the people I care about when leaving my favorite cidery. The opening line of “I Wish You Love,” a song I first heard sung by Gloria Lynne, is this: “Goodbye, no use leading with our chins …” The first stanza ends with “never lovers, ever friends.” When my mother came to care for her forty-year-old son after he had been hospitalized, my friends took her shopping in St. Louis, and in later years, commented on Mom’s fashion sense. Of course, my friends were fashion art directors, so there was that.
I’ve been lucky in the friend department. I have two friends that I met in the 1980s when I was an adult student at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany Indiana. We “three amigos” are still friends, almost 40 years, five spouses, and four children later. Another friend is the former sister-in-law of one of the “big three,” and she has taught me her artistry and we have shared our love of reading. And I’m extremely lucky to have my sister as my friend. I recently visited some friends that I had when I lived in St. Louis, and my habit of always singing was not lost on them, and the bride said that it had been a long time since I had sung to her.
“Will you sing to me?”
The woman asked that of me at an awkward time, and I hesitated, a rare pause in my vocal output. Then, I relented and quietly sang, “She takes the winter and makes it summer … no one could ever replace, my Nancy with the laughing face.” I was at the commemoration of the life of another good friend, and my initial hesitation was due to the somberness of the occasion. But I considered the “quality of mercy” in the man who was being honored that day and knew that he would not be offended by my song, sung to his wife’s friend.
Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway sang Carol King’s composition, “You’ve Got A Friend.” Before I set fire to my relationship with my first bride, I walked around our house singing that version: “You just call out my name/And you know wherever I am/I’ll come running … /You got a friend.” And Steve Nicewanger was that kind of friend, and I am so lucky to have had his friendship.
I got a friend.
cjon3acd@att.net