The Friends of Your Life Are a Garden

You plant, you stake, you water--acts of love for a creation that won't stay this way forever.

In, “The Garden” by Gustave Caillebotte, I can’t help but notice missing chairs at the table.

I was waiting for a light to change, my gaze drifting over the traffic, when my friend Bruce leaned halfway out a passenger-side window and yelled, like a teenager bound for a party, “Hi, Rona!”

Nobody told me Bruce had blown into town. He should have been anywhere but that corner in Toronto. Off on his boat, or raising a glass in some restaurant where diners wait months for a table. Half a minute earlier or later, and I’d have missed him, this cutup well past 60, proclaiming his delight to all and sundry.

I used to envy girls who were hailed from passing cars. I was never invited to the party, never caught the attention of a fun-loving guy with a gift of a smile. Yet I could almost believe I was going to a party that night, to rest my head on a warm male shoulder, while Smokey Robinson sang, “I Second That Emotion.”

I see Bruce every time I pass Adelaide and Jarvis—Bruce’s Corner to me forever more. It’s been a good dozen years, and the memory still shines. Yet when I shared it with my sister, she asked, “Why have you never mentioned Bruce?” The answer stung. I didn’t think there was a whole lot to say. Bruce was not the one I turned to when my mother died, when I nearly lost hope for my marriage, when I wept after leaving my son at his dorm room. Bruce offered no quotable advice. If he read Emily Dickinson, he never let on. Yet none of my intimates gave me what Bruce did that morning at his corner.

I’d have called him a minor friend. Does any such person exist?

The bonds of a lifetime are like a garden. The first 40 years, give or take, you spend designing and planting the loveliest retreat you can imagine. You water, weed and prune. Each paving stone and flower plays its part in the design. The empty spaces appear so sporadically, the garden retains its shape. You don’t see that your creation is slipping out of your control. A new empty space in my garden is not just a fluke anymore. It’s the way things will be for the duration.

For years the loss of a friend seemed unimaginable to me. The only death that concerned me was my own—of cancer, more often than not. Doctors learned to humor me. One asked, while inspecting my knee for a suspicious bump, “Have you noticed the identical bump on your other knee?” I made frequent visits to the closest bookstore, there to seek reassurance from A Dictionary of Symptoms, a stout and severe-looking tome whose burgundy jacket suggested leather chairs in the faculty lounge of an august medical school. I longed for a copy of my own but resisted for fear of my husband’s derision. We both knew hypochondria was making me absurd.

I began to creak and sag but powered on. Many friends and colleagues were not so lucky. I lost Joanna, Keitha, Arthur, Val, and my brother-in-law Jim to various cancers; James to a neurological disease I’d never heard of until it took him down. Anne, the confidante of my teens, had been planning to fly to Toronto for a visit when I learned of her fatal heart attack. Now the stakes are getting higher. People I barely liked when they were young have grown lovable with age as they shuck the disguises of youth. Bruce was that kind of friend.

We used to meet in our striving years, at staid affairs where guests wore wore nametags and uniformed waiters passed mini-quiches around. A former colleague of my husband’s, he would smile and nod while looking over our shoulders for someone more likely to advance his agenda of the moment. He struck us both as rather too full of himself. As careers kept throwing us together, we followed his churning enthusiasms: first boat, first business, first strategic role in a political campaign.

Our real-estate adventures overlapped. My husband and I bought the modernist castle that Bruce’s first wife vetoed, all angles like a German Expressionist film set. They moved into the faux-Georgian my husband preferred. Our friendship, if that’s what it was, expressed a search for position embodied in two houses of roughly the same lofty price, perched on the same ravine. The night Bruce brought his wife to dinner in the house that should have been his, I could tell he was still smarting.

Bruce’s second wife, a blithe Southerner, awakened his free-and-easy side. They bought a beachfront place in South Carolina and hosted us there one New Year’s Eve. No one dressed up, everyone strolled down the beach at some point or other and Bruce left the New Year’s table to take a bedtime call from a grandchild. Next morning in the kitchen, amid the debris of the feast, he threw his arms wide and exclaimed, “We’re simpatico!” Lo and behold, we were.

My husband and I had moved on long ago from the Expressionist house that none of us fancied anymore. Bruce, in his bathrobe, had nothing to prove. Dinner that night would be Anne’s famous Tater Tot casserole, which he promised we’d love if we gave it a chance. We decided he was a keeper. The casserole too, but only if Bruce was at the table.

We saw him last at a posh Toronto restaurant, tanned and fit after playing the best golf of his life. The four of us must have looked like the happiest people in the room, as people tended to do in Bruce’s company. “I need to tell you what’s going on with me,” he began. A longstanding cancer, no secret to us, had entered its final phase. He had a few months—long enough, he let us believe, for one more visit. How could a man who looked so well not have it in him?

We were waiting for the maître-d’ to fetch our coats when a colleague appeared from our old days on the mini-quiche circuit. Clapped Bruce on the back, mentioned grabbing a drink if he had time. Bruce murmured something vague and lowered his head. I heard him whisper one word: “Time.”

He’s been gone for nine years, but every time I pass his corner I’m embraced again by his happiness. I miss the piece of me that bloomed with him. It’s a kind of symptom, the missing. A symptom of love.

Are you missing a friend today? Tell me about that person. Have you redesigned your friendship garden as empty spaces appear? That’s a rich conversation too. Thank you for joining me, Amazement Seekers. I look forward all week to meeting you here. Next week I’ll be in transit. If I’m a bit late posting, please bear with me.