The Comforting Illusions of Friendship

by Geoffrey Clarfield (April 2011)

Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends

Unless some dull and favorable hand

Will whisper music to my weary spirit

Only decades later do I realize that despite the model of suburban sobriety, progressive values and behavior that my beloved suburb presented to the rest of the world and which was immortalized in that classic sociological study, Crestwood Heights, the inner life of my suburb was a hidden book of secrets. We, that is my friends and neighbors, had grandparents whose first language was Yiddish, whose second was Hebrew, whose third may have been Russian or Polish and whose fourth was English.

They came from history books and Walter Cronkite documentaries. Their lives were lived in the black and white films where we would see Churchill give the victory sign and waddle off the screen like a duck. My grandfather spoke of Cossack attacks on his house when he was a boy, of pogroms and mystical Rabbis, of hunger and Eastern European snowy winters, not the winter that I knew which was best for sleigh riding and Chinese food.

My father and his friends did not talk or look like the other men their age that we mostly came across as teachers in school. My father and his friends spoke with the accents of American film stars from the forties. They did not have typical Toronto Canadian accents. They looked and talked like residents of New York City and to this day many of my colleagues think I was born in the States. I suppose that when growing up poor and Jewish in Toronto during the depression there were few role models of hope in Canadian society.

Richard seemed American too. He had blue eyes and an enormous natural Afro, He spoke softly, like many Californians that I have later met, and as a teenager he seemed to have had a way with women, whereas despite the fact that I may have been in the hearts of some, I could only respond to the affections of a few. If truth be told, in those teenage days, I did find one girl that I thought I could truly love and since my love could have been returned, I spurned her, out of fear, since I could not yet believe in my own happiness. So for some time I had a teenage darkness of the soul and happiness only returned in my twenties. But despite my dark mood, my friends were always there for me.

but come what sorrow can

It cannot countervail the exchange of joy

That one short minute gives me in her sight

If after marriage and children love still remains a mystery, so hard to define, and so different for different people, how much more mysterious is friendship? The Bible says man is not whole without woman. There are many myths that at the beginning of time there was neither male nor female. Then as the elders tell it, there was an archaic separation and ever since, men and women have each been trying to reduce that separation and thus they cleave to one another. But friendship, what is that? And when it is gone, what was it?

Richard and I played a lot of guitar, sang a lot of songs and played for a lot of friends. But Richard was from a different suburb. He had eventually moved to Forest Hill after I had met him and he still kept up with the kids from his home area. They were more urban and reckless than my lot and by the time they were sixteen or seventeen they had somehow managed to rent a house (through some older friend or elder brother over 21) and used it for all night parties and weekends.

They would converge there till the early hours of the morning sipping herbal tea, doing Yoga, and then once in a while, they would hire a high school hall, invite their friends and the friends of their friends and just like that, an instant event, a dream of midsummer would appear on the stage and a series of performances would move through the night. They called themselves the Green Fence.

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino

Orpheus with his lute made trees

And the mountain tops that freeze

Bow themselves when he did sing

To his music plants and flowers

Ever sprung, as sun and showers

There had made a lasting spring

Men shut doors against a setting sun

Richard was drowning in an ocean of madness that I was frightened to enter myself lest I be brought down with him, fearing a form of primitive contagion, like some episode in the Golden Bough. As he was tossed upon the waves of madness, in my life, the colors slowly grew richer as the joy of living came my way once again.

Richard returned to the land of black and white, to the legacy of his parents who came from Poland, who I came to realize had experienced things during the Holocaust that they never told him about, but could not hide from him in their behavior. Whenever I saw them I knew that there were dark tales that lived in their eyes but that could not be spoken. Richard was the youngest son and so was I, but my Canadian born parents stood between me and the pogroms experienced by my grandparents.

No one stood in between Richard and his parents and, despite the genetic component of his illness, which no doubt randomly jumps across generations, like the grim reaper, I felt, perhaps wrongly, that their grief eventually overcame him. Like all younger sons he did what they wanted, succumbed to their grief. And, I supposed then that their madness was stronger than our friendship, would that it had been the other way around.

I now wish that when Richard went mad, I had been older, married, with children, leisure time and resources. I would have tried to get more involved, to see if I could have been of assistance, find a better doctor, find the right therapist, and be there for him. If the nature of his illness was and is greater than its nurture, it may have made no difference at all.

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow

Raze out the written troubles of the brain

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Which weighs upon the heart?

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