One of my oldest friends called me about an hour ago. “I’ve got six bucks in my pocket,” he said, and “the rent is due.”
This is a man I’ve known since I was 17, for a half century. We’ve been through a total of 7 divorces together; countless relationships and other, as they say “ups and downs.”
He’s a sculptor of merit, doing mostly “municipal” pieces in parks and public places, as well as his own work. An architect of great merit in his earlier years, having build Roman Catholic churches, he went through that which many of us experience and fell hard.
“How much?” I asked. He responded and I said I’d wire him the dough, which I did, as well as a couple of hundred extra bucks.
I’m not a rich man. However, friends of such tenure who would “watch my back on a night patrol,” as they used say in Vietnam, are few and far between. They are “friends” in the truest sense, most definitive sense of the word.
