Friends from the Past

 

There are some friendships that seem less like choices than like the slow, patient work of time itself, laid down year after year until the memory of their beginning becomes almost indistinguishable from the memory of one’s own life. So it was when Jerry and Marlene McCain came to visit us this week, traveling home to Rutledge, Tennessee, after wandering through the vast reaches of Yellowstone, where the mountains and steaming earth must have seemed as old as the world itself.

Seeing them again carried us backward through more than half a century, to Tulsa in 1971, when our lives were simpler in their outward appearance, though no less full of hope than they are now. We lived side by side in adjoining mobile homes, close enough that one day’s conversation drifted almost naturally into the next. Louise and Marlene found in one another the easy companionship that asks for neither explanation nor effort, while Jerry and I discovered the same quiet understanding between us.

Those were years when the future was still unfolding before all of us. Jerry had only recently completed his service in the United States Navy and was studying at the Spartan School of Aviation, carrying with him the determination of a young man intent upon building a life with his own hands. After graduating in 1972, he and Marlene journeyed east to Virginia, where he spent more than forty years with Allied Chemical, remaining faithful to one company until retirement finally called him away from the work that had occupied so much of his life.

Our own path bent in another direction. Louise and I left Tulsa for Detroit before returning again the following year, as though life itself had decided that home was something we would have to leave before we could fully appreciate it. I eventually made my career at Tulsa Winch, working there until my retirement in 1998, measuring the passing years less by the calendar than by the familiar rhythm of work, family, and the friendships that somehow endured despite the miles and decades between us.

When friends such as Jerry and Marlene return, they do more than cross the threshold of a house. They bring with them the quiet company of all the years that have gone before—the people we once were, the hopes we carried, and the enduring grace that allows certain friendships to remain unchanged, even as everything else yields to time.

(AI Assisted)