My recent Chatty Blog entitled Time was the beginning of this wretched habit I have of thinking of friends gone and times past. Those who follow this drivel know that I tend to be sentimental to the point of being maudlin.
It’s not that I want to go back, as I would miss so much about today. Nevertheless, I think of friends I will never see again and get nostalgic.
Today, I was thinking about John. We both lived in Española, NM, in the early 1970s. He and Keller and I would sit, late into the night, playing Bob Dylan, drinking coffee (yeah, only coffee), discussing life, the universe, and everything. I haven’t talked to Keller for years, and he doesn’t know where John is.
In keeping with my theme in the Time blog, I was surprised to realize that it has been 50 years since we sat in that old adobe in Llano and talked. And my heart ached. Like a silly fool, I listened to Baez sing “Diamonds and Rust” and “From Boulder to Birmingham” while showering this morning.
But the part I didn’t see coming was me thinking of Margo in my novel, Members of the Cast, and how she became Maggie. She would be a couple of years older than me, and I wonder how she is doing. I get nostalgic. Silly, but I miss her. I only spent a few years with her, but we became so close then. Our lives have gone in different directions.
Before the book was finished, I wrote a prolog or epilog or something about a phone call Maggie got when she was 77 years old. It let me watch her think of the members of the (her) cast during her junior year of high school. The people who made her who she is—even if she isn’t real. Even as I wrote the piece, I knew that not everyone in the “cast” was still alive. And my heart ached with her.
“Here I sit, hand on the telephone,” thinking of members of my cast. Vonnegut wrote that sometimes, late at night, he called old friends. I understand that more these days. I had only four girlfriends that lasted any length of time. I’m married to one. Sally and Jill have died, and I can’t find Karen. Dean, Mark, Kent, Mark, Jim, David—all important members of my cast are gone. And my heart aches. Maybe I will search for John on the Internet again…
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