BFF

My best friend died a year ago today.

Before going down for his funeral, I started jotting down notes about some of the memories we’d created over our 40-plus years.

Each one had long-since taken shorthand form for us; a few words that instantly transported us back to a specific point in time:

Chinese Genetics. The Lightning Storm. The Accommodation Bar. Throw Double-Ones. Evil Roy Slade. The Best Meal Ever. The Worst Night Ever. Is This a Purse, or What? You Sugared the Eggs. Bulls Strategy. Beat the Dolt.

And so on. I had 58 when I stopped, but there are more.

Each one still transports me.

Some tales inevitably grew with the telling. In Beat the Dolt, our account of a college intramural football game, the number of touchdown passes he threw me inched up over the years. No matter. Friendships don’t rely on facts.

I can still hear his voice, and the to-the-point way he started every phone call to me (“Rogers? Furby.”). I can feel his handshake, left hand gripping my upper arm, as he warns me to drive carefully. I can see him in the distance of Victoria Station, 1988, as he stops, puts down his bag, and thrusts both arms over his head, triumphant: two Moss Point boys together in London. England, beware!

We talked and argued endlessly over God, politics and sports. He made me laugh more than anyone else. He saved my sanity more than once.

Our last conversation was by phone, him in a hospital room in Mississippi, me in my kitchen in New York. He was to have more tests the next day, yet another effort to find out what was wrong, to see what could be done to fix it.

“Hang in there, boy,” I said.

“I will,” he said.

But he couldn’t.

I’ve put a candle on the mantel today. It’s in memory, and honor, of the light he brought to my life.

The candle will go out. The light will not.