Imagine

So there I was last night, sitting on my couch and watching Law & Order, as I am wont to do on weeknights when I am actually at home, when the phone rang. 503 area code. Oregon. It could only be one person.

It was my dearly cherished, long-lost friend Jim, red of hair, blue of eyes, kind of heart. And also, sadly enough, a foot soldier in the sugar wars.

Jim and I met on the very first day of freshman year at the University of Delaware. How I ended up there still remains a mystery. Sure, they gave me a crapload of scholarship money, but in at least 87 different ways, it was the wrong school for me. That being said, I definitely didn't want to go to the tiny upstate Catholic college that my parents had in mind. At 18, I just wanted to get the hell out of New York. I didn't want to deal with the snow, mean state troopers patrolling the Quickway, or seeing people that I knew from high school.

What I didn't know at the time was that there were no bagels, no art-house films, no good hair stylists, and no one I was close with to be found in the state of Delaware. So when I met Jim, at a sunny September afternoon reading group for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (one's of UD's required summer reading titles), I was happy just to have made a friend.

And we were great friends, inseparable for that first semester. He was, inevitably, the person who got me fascinated with the Old Testament, since we would stay up till all hours debating religion, talking about books (poetry in general, Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions in particular), classes, music, family expectations - all the strange and lovely things you think about when you're 18. When you don't have any idea that soon enough, you won't have time to think about them anymore.

In some way, perhaps because he wasn't one of the 87,000 students who already knew each other through Delaware's incestuous high school system, or maybe because we both loved the Beatles, poetry, G-d and hiking through the nearby state park, my time with him made up for almost all of the things I was missing about New York.

When my dad had a heart attack that December, Jim was the person who took the eight hour bus ride up to NYC and back with me, and then went with me on Metro North up to New Rochelle so we could visit my dad in the ICU. I remember that when we walked into the room, my dad was sitting up, with that irrepressible grin, green eyes sparkling. He pointed to the clock on the wall. "Do you believe this crap?" he asked us. "Not even a TV set. All I've got is this goddamn clock. If I had my gun, I'd shoot it."

All righty then. Hi, Dad, this is my friend Jim (who probably now thinks that the next bullet is for him).

After we broke up second semester (I went home over winter session to break up with the person I was dating; he didn't) we drifted apart somewhat, especially after his exceedingly immature and hostile high school sweetheart arrived at Delware in our sophomore year. But somewhow, we managed to stay friends throughout college and for years afterwards, years that brought us his wedding to that very same exceedingly immature and hostile high school sweetheart, my Masters degree and the pathetic first draft of The Bookseller's Sonnets, his divorce from his high school sweetheart, my getting pushed down a flight of South Philly stairs by a drunk ex-boyfriend.

When he finally left town in the wake of that painful divorce and moved to Alaska, I visited for a couple of weeks, some of which we spent hiking the Kenai Peninsula. Those weeks were among the happiest and weirdest and most awkward of my life. We didn't know where we were going, what we wanted to do with our lives, how to get ourselves out of the long-distance mess we had gotten ourselves into. Finally, homesickness got me in the end and even as much as I adored him, and as much as I cried on that eleven-hour Northwest flight back to JFK, I couldn't wait to get home to my real life - my friends, my family - back in New York.

Collectively, our parents thought we were a perfect match. I bought him a watch for Christmas. My dad helped me pick it out. "We're here for the watch now," he told the family jeweler. "Next year, I think we'll be back for the ring.

But in the end, we never picked out that ring. It wasn't anything specific, like religion (which it could have been) or the distance (which it also could have been). Time passed; being apart brought with it too many tears, too much drama. And by the time we had both made three trips back and forth across the country, we realized we just didn't love each other in quite the right way that you need to make a life together. It just wasn't destiny. It wasn't basherte. It wasn't meant to be.

Time has changed us both; last night we talked about sugar, carbs, the glycemic index. Then I got to hear all about life in Oregon with his wife and his two beautiful little girls - his is a good life, a blessed life. And listening to his advice, hearing us both laughing again, made me feel just as safe and cared for and befriended as I felt all those years ago, walking into the ICU to see my dad, afraid of what the outcome would be. I didn't feel old enough to lose a father then. I still don't feel old enough now.

After I hung up the phone, I was hit with a sudden memory, unbidden, of the two of us sitting together in the dark of the movie theater on Main Street in Newark, watching the documentary Imagine. The phone rang again - my friend Ellen, from California, checking in - and I picked up the remote to surf with the sound off. And there it was, nearly twenty years later, on VH1 Classic - John and Yoko, hand in hand, walking towards the warm orange light of a New York City sunset.

As I stared at the screen I realized it: we are both now almost as old as John Lennon was when he died.

So it goes.