TIme to let go

I called John two days after Christmas. We spoke just one minute on the phone. “Jim, can I call you back? It’s not a good time right now.” That was the last time we spoke.

New Year’s Eve, I thought about seeing him at the hospital two years earlier. I was on my way to Munich. He was so critical, I cut my travel short two days and came back to see him. But he pulled through and gave us another two years.

January 6, I wanted to call John. I remembered our trip to Milan back in ’94, little more than seven years earlier. We walked the streets with all the Christmas shoppers and enjoyed the bracing weather. We tippy-toed across the roof of the Duomo. I fell in love with him all over again, spending a week with John in Italy.

Another several days passed and I looked at the phone. No, let him call me. Just like the early years after I moved to Philadelphia. We had a spat because he went back to an old boyfriend of his. So I found my own boyfriend and we moved in together. I let go of John until one day we met for lunch, then we became best friends all over again.

John’s birthday was the 20th. One year since W became president and started destroying the world. I called him, no answer. So I called two more times and then tried his mother, no answer. I’ll never forget the first time he told me his birthday – sitting in that Pittsburgh diner when we were in college. When was that? May ’84, I think.

The call came two days later. He’d slipped away that morning. His mother, dear Christine, she called. I thought about the first time I laid eyes on his handsome face and how the overhead light shined on his balding head. Twenty years go quickly.