Notes, for Robert

 

                Do you remember writing notes in high school?

                I was watching a couple of girls elaborately folding paper on Friday while they waited for the rest of the class to catch up with the work.  One was creating a cootie catcher, the other, a lotus. Either could have been a note, to be passed hand to hand in a crowded corridor between classes. But students don’t write notes any more, even though they are still sitting in the back of math class, daydreaming.

                Notes were the glue of our friendship. Maybe because we went to a regional high school, where it was 45 minute drive between houses. Maybe it was that long distance calls were expensive and we were not allowed to talk on the phone for hours after our parents got the first bill. Maybe we just had more down time in our lives because there was less to distract us, especially during the cold, icy road winter.  The first note you gave to someone marked a new level in your relationship—you were someone they were thinking about when you were not around!

                We wrote about everything and nothing. My friend Barbara had spiky handwriting, drew horses and dragons in the corners of her paper, and continued the Dungeons and Dragons stories we were all considering—early Romtasty, some days. Mark wrote epic poems. Robert, with the nicest, roundest handwriting of all, wrote out Spanish verb conjugations as mini-lessons (he was the only one of us excited about learning another language).  My notes, with the same slanting the wrong way, slightly smudged ants on a log handwriting that earned me a failing penmanship grade in first grade, ranged from complaints about the English teacher to reporting on my most recent reading and the exploration of the heroic journey across novels.

 

                I was thinking about note writing already this weekend when I heard that one of my constant pen pals had died from a heart attack that day.  He was my high school friend, which is a deep, old friendship, even though we have not spoken in years. We were lab partners, dissecting a frog together. We shared English and Social Studies teachers, were in the same clubs, on the same field trips. In the afternoons, we rode home on the bus together, laughing, or, when we were older, borrowed his mother’s car and wandered the mall. We watched Grease three times because he loved Olivia Newton John. And—this is true friendship here-- he called me the day after prom to assure me that I had not missed anything. 

So much, in retrospect, went unsaid, even in those volumes of letters. No one ever said “I am gay” or “my parent drinks too much and they argue all the time” or “I am afraid to grow up because the world is dark right now”.  We had time. We would get there. We were young. And still, we were all haunted by James Taylor’s song, Fire and Rain on those long, cold bus rides, 6:30 in the morning, to pass a note written the night before, before class started at 7:25 AM…

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you, baby
One more time again, now
Thought I'd see you one more time again
There's just a few things coming my way this time around, now
Thought I'd see you, thought I'd see you, fire and rain, now….