November 12

Yesterday I said good-bye to two old friends; one in the morning the other in the afternoon. Then I drove back to this cabin at the dark end of that cold, cold day and tonight, just moments ago, I woke to see the sky completely alive with the sparkle of a billion stars and I opened the window and felt the freezing air on my face and heard a distant jet moving through the night but nothing else. The crickets have settled deep in the soil, even the owls have retreated in the face of early winter. It is beautiful, the brilliant stillness, those stars we share but seldom see. They make me think of friends and lovers and people I’ve known for a nod and whether they too are looking at the stars early early in the morning when I can never sleep.

I’ll miss the two men I said good bye to yesterday, one in an office, the other in a bar on 18th street, a bar I had come to know after one of the romantic collisions in my life left me lonely and hungry for company of any kind.

One of them was crying just a bit, when we said good-bye on the corner of 21st street and Fifth Avenue, I suspect the other never cries but his farewell warmed me just the same. I will miss them both in different ways but from the same place in my heart. They are men with whom I have worked and played and whose character I came to know from the tests that life displays. They are good men, good at what they do, men who have made contributions to their art and it has been a pleasure and an honor for me to have had the opportunity to know them and work with them.

It is one thing to feel nostalgic for a streetscape or a notion of a neighborhood that you must leave behind, it is quite another to say goodbye to the companions with whom you have shared the creation of your life’s work, the daily build and strike of creation, the labor of art and commerce that we do together. It is the end of our camaraderie of accomplishment, of challenge and effort and success at the end of the day, that makes these partings, two of the hardest I will make.