I Had a Friend

Last night I received a telephone call from my best friend, who now lives on the coast of far northern California. We met twenty-five years ago--in 1984--when I was teaching at Louisiana State University and she was teaching in a local high school east of Baton Rouge. Although my husband and I moved from Louisiana in 1987, my Louisiana friend and I have been best friends ever since, through highly dramatic times and more peaceful, settled times. For years, I did all the moving, from Louisiana back to Texas, to Minnesota, to Georgia, back to Texas, back to Georgia, while my friend stayed in Louisiana. Now she has moved, and an entire continent separates us.

My friend and I rarely talk on the phone. The only people I frequently call are my mother in Texas and my husband and children for short conversations on the cell phone. For years, I was a prolific writer of letters, and this is how my friend and I kept in touch, as well as how I kept in touch with other friends. The other friends, eventually, quit corresponding, but this friend has remained a faithful correspondent since 1984. We write fewer letters, but we keep in touch by e-mail. Letters are best, I think, but it seems that few people these days are letter writers.

Not too long ago, letter-writing was an art and a blessing. It was how people who loved one another yet who lived far away from one another kept in touch. We have boxes and boxes of letters written by my husband's ancestors and their friends, some going back to the mid-1800s. I have begun going through those letters again and all the ephemera attached to them: the recipe clippings of a grandmother, the postcards of a great-aunt who was epileptic and who collected postcards as a hobby, the valentines collected by another great-aunt, the religious pamphlets and tourist guides someone collected and filed in a drawer somewhere to be discovered again 70-100 years later, the photographs of people long forgotten. I went through these boxes when we first received them in the late 1980s, but the remnants of these once engaged and eager lives filled me with sadness. They reminded me too well of the eventual fate of myself and all that I have ever loved.

Last night, after talking with my friend for a hour or so, I returned to the pile of family records I have here in my study (boxes are stacked elsewhere). In one basket I had placed a number of those memorial booklets provided by funeral homes. The geographic stability of a family can be established by looking at such booklets. The oldest one in this particular collection is dated 1943; it's the memorial record for my husband's great-grandmother, Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong (Sr.--one of her daughters had the same name), who was born in 1864 and died in Houston, Texas, in 1943. Next comes the memorial record of Edwin Oscar Cook, a cousin of the family, who was born in New Orleans in 1880 and died in Houston in 1955. Next is the memorial booklet for the great-aunt who was epileptic: Helen Frances Armstrong, born in Houston, Texas, in 1898, and died in Houston in 1962. Finally, the latest memorial booklet is for Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong (known as "Mimi" to her family, the daughter of MONA Sr.), born in Houston in 1896, died in Houston in 1986. Every one of these remembrance booklets have the stamp of Geo. H. Lewis & Company or Geo. H. Lewis & Sons. From 1943 to 1986, George H. Lewis and Sons Funeral Directors have prepared the final services for the elderly members of my husband's family. The company still exists in Houston, Texas: George H. Lewis and Sons Funeral Directors.

Having in her possession when she died most of the family materials, Mimi lived all her life in Houston, with summers spent in Boulder, Colorado, and she taught first grade in Houston for 30 years. As old as she was when she died, a number of friends and family remained to write their signatures under the "Relatives and Friends" column of the remembrance album--sixty of them, including me, an in-law. Edwin O. Cook, however, the cousin who died 350 miles from his New Orleans home, at the age of 75, has no signatures of friends left behind--though the booklet does contain a typed list of eleven floral remembrances. Finally, we outlive every friendship, and some distant relative sends chrysanthemums to the funeral home, or, these days, donates to the American Cancer Society.

Going through these old papers, photographs, and memorials can be depressing as one remembers that they represent people who once lived and loved. Years ago I read Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Cranford and was struck by the profound insight revealed by the main character, Miss Mary Smith, when she and her elderly friend Miss Matty sit down one evening to read old letters:

I never knew what sad work the reading of old-letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why. The letters were as happy as letters could be - at least those early letters were. There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth. I should have felt less melancholy, I believe, if the letters had been more so.

Yes, the reading of old letters is a sad enterprise, as the letter writers rise up before us as apparitions of their corporeal selves. And it seems very appropriate, as I was having these thoughts by going through old letters, that this morning I opened a book I've been reading, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and encountered this poem by Buson:

Mourning for Hokuju Rosen


You left in the morning. Tonight my heart is in a thousand pieces.
Why are you so far away?

Thinking of you I go to the hillside and wander.
The hillside--why is it so saddening?

Yellow of dandelions, the shepherd's purse blooming white.
There's no one to look at them.

A pheasant calls and calls without stopping.
I had a friend. We lived with a river between us.

Smoke rises, the west wind blowing so hard
in the fields of bamboo grass and sedge
it doesn't linger.

I had a friend. We lived with a river between us.
Not even the birds call out hororo.

You left in the morning. Tonight my heart is in a thousand pieces.
Why are you far away?

By the image of Amida I light no candle
and offer no flowers. I sit here alone,
my heart heavy, filled with gratitude.

Gratitude. Yes. I have still a friend. We live with a continent between us.