The Pools at the Bottom

Pic courtesy of fws.gov

Tim and I were friends in elementary school and through high school. We fished and we hiked all over the Western Massachusetts  Berkshires. We specialized in finding waterfalls and the pools at the bottom that held brook trout. Small but beautiful. Tim always caught more than me. We almost always let them go, careful with how we handled them. He’s also the one who turned me on to Hemingway, including Big Two-Hearted River, both parts. A man goes fishing alone, and the whole story is what he doesn’t say.

High school ended. We went to different colleges. Jobs came, then families, and life pulled us in different directions. Forty years went by before we found our way back to each other.

This kind of drift happens to almost everyone. Nobody decides to lose a friend. It happens in small pieces: you mean to call, you don’t call, the next week comes and you don’t call then either. The years pass like that, fast, faster than you expect, until you realize you don’t actually know how someone you once knew well is doing anymore.

Judy, Tim’s wife, died this past April. Since then there have been a couple of text messages, nothing more. I haven’t picked up the phone. I never met his two sons. Forty years apart is enough time to miss entire chapters of somebody’s life.

What I do remember is Bub’s BBQ in Sunderland, where we started getting together about eight years ago, every fall: Tim and Judy, Diane and me. A picnic table, plates of barbecue, a few beers, old stories, a lot of laughs. You could see how much Tim and Judy still loved each other just in how they sat together. Bub’s closed this year after almost fifty years in business. That’s the kind of detail that tells you how much time had actually gone by without me noticing.

Time moves faster than the people living in it ever plan for. Forty years can pass between two friends who never had a falling out, never had one bad conversation, and just stopped calling. If there’s someone you’ve been meaning to call, calling closes the gap. Waiting only grows it.

Diane and I will be at the celebration of Judy’s life next month. After that, I’m hoping we get back out fishing. He’ll probably still catch more brookies than me. I don’t think I’ve got forty years left to find out.