Three little boys, strangers, walked down the long gothic hallway. Sunlight filtered in through the tall stained-glass windows of Blaine Hall, where Thomas Dewey’s Elementary School merged in 1903 with the University of Chicago’s School of Education.  Each boy, oblivious to the other a few feet away, clutched his mother’s hand as they walked down the long hallway of polished flagstone towards Mrs. Bernstein’s First Grade classroom. It is September 1968. I was particularly nervous having just switched to the Lab School after my Kindergarten year at Kosminski public school, which was pretty harsh, and where my class was all black except me and a blond haired blue eyed Danish kid named Olaf Kirsten.  One day, our entire kindergarten class was marched down to the boiler room in the basement of the old brick school, and were told it was a whipping machine where bad kids were sent to be punished.  So, I didn’t really know what to expect at this new school, it couldn’t be worse I thought. 

 

Back in Blaine Hall, each of the three first graders sported a fresh school day haircut that looked like a salad bowl had been placed on their heads and the hair cut around the edge in a circle.  David Hyman wore grey corduroy pants and a navy turtleneck shirt which belied his mother’s sense of style having been a professional ballet dancer, and his family having just returned from living in Italy for two years.  Sebastian Rotella wore a matching burgundy colored jean jacket and pants combination, contemporary, stylish, and utilitarian all at the same time, emblematic of his brilliant first-generation immigrant parents, both PhD’s in their own right.  I wore a T-shirt, striped overalls with a hole worn through in the knee of one pant leg, and brown leather work boots; these were the clothes of a high energy adventure seeker.  “Children, quiet please, line up along the wall, that’s it line up please” this stern looking woman with short black hair announced.  Through the partially opened door I could see shiny desks each with its own chair, gleaming fluorescent lights overhead, a large desk at the front of the room, the walls covered with blackboards, colorful posters, and a long alphabet model which took up two walls.  I quickly learned Hyman was ahead of Mayers in line, and Rotella brought up the rear with some unknown classmates in between each of us. We were unaware of each other that day, and certainly never contemplated that the three of us would become the closest of friends, a friendship that would endure the next fifty-four years and counting.  We have been Porthos, Athos & Aramis - Three Musketeers, helping each other navigate the rocky shoals of birth, health, disease, careers, death, marriage, children, parents, success, failure, happiness, sadness, family, life. 

 

Now if the story stopped here, I would already be richer than most people with three great lifelong friends with whom I am to this day in weekly contact, but when your parents tell you that you and your friend David Freeman potty trained each other when you were two years old at a 1960’s cooperative summer camp, well another lifelong friend is born.  In fact, David and I have kept in close touch to this day since elementary school, even during his parents’ difficult divorce which resulted in him being moved to Israel with his mother and her new husband during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

 

Having amazing lifelong friends is great and I’m very mindful of how lucky I am, but truth be told, my friends have really been like an extended nuclear family for me.  My parents - incredible people, whom I love dearly, were married at twenty and twenty-one, and I followed shortly thereafter.  During most of my first 15 years my parents were working hard, earning multiple graduate degrees, as a result I had an unusual amount of freedom, autonomy, and at times a lack of supervision. Also, from age nine to fifteen we lived in a college dormitory during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s with a bunch of smart, creative, and zany college students.  This unconventional, freewheeling upbringing contributed to the special friendships I developed with my four closest friends, along with several others whom I have known practically as long and keep in touch with regularly.  It seems logical that having a lot of freedom and independence at an early age made me seek out surrogate familial relationships among my peers.  Sebastian and Hyman had intact traditional nuclear families living in nice single-family homes that I dreamed of living in.  We lived in a series of apartments, in the same neighborhood, moving frequently and money was tight, yet I was white and more privileged than many living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960’s and 70’s.  Dave Freeman had a more chaotic childhood, marked by a contentious divorce and an upbringing of “benign neglect” as his wife Alix calls it.  While I don’t feel I was neglected, I’m convinced there is a connection between my childhood upbringing and the close lifelong friendships I have been blessed with.

 

This year I intentionally let go of and lost two longtime close friends of 20 and 40 years respectively due to their support of Trump and Trumpism.  I’m mindful also of the work it takes to maintain good healthy friendships, and the fragility of friendships particularly at this time of great division and uncertainty in our country.

 

And so, it goes.