Only the Changed Changes

A friend of mine from Northern California was in town last week. I hadn't seen Ronald in about a year and a half, two years now. He's a furtive type-more furtive than me, even-yet every time he passes through New York, he sets some time aside so we can get together. We've been friends for upwards of 15 years, but in those years we'd only had the chance to get together in person three or four times.

In the early years, we mostly kept in contact via the telephone and the mail. For the last few years, of course, we've used email. (He's an old-school technophile, in contrast to my own technophobic ways, but email seems an easy compromise.)

It's always interesting for me to see people I haven't seen in a while. As we all do, I suppose, I form pictures of people in my head, and with the passage of time and the continuing decline of the eyesight, those pictures can grow a little distorted. Actually seeing someone again in front of me is always a bit of a shock. In many cases I don't even recognize them at first, just continue to stare past them until they identify themselves.

This has tended to be even more extreme in my dealings with Ronald, as his appearance has changed so dramatically since we first met.

First time we got together, in fact, back in 1992, I was convinced he was seven feet tall. Part of that had to do, I'm sure, with the fact that I admired him a great deal-even considered him a bit of a hero. All I remember from that first afternoon is craning my head back to look up at him as we walked through the midtown streets in the rain, talking.

Before we met, I'd seen pictures of him in which he looked like an accountant, with short hair and glasses. When we first met in person in '92, the glasses were gone, he had dark hair down to his shoulders and was dressed quite nattily.

The second time we got together, meeting up on the street one mid-summer afternoon in 1999, I realized that he wasn't seven feet tall at all. Quite the opposite, in fact-he was much shorter than I was. He was a tiny fellow. And that time he was wearing a faded plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

It's funny how perceptions can work-especially when they're skewed to begin with.

This time he was in town for a week, but facing a fairly hectic schedule of meetings and whatnot. Still, we were able to meet up for lunch.

I waited on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant at around noon on Saturday. It was a chilly day, but that was fine. A few minutes after 12, a taxi pulled up and I heard one of the doors open and close. A moment later, Ronald was standing in front of me, leaning in close so I could see him. Strangely, he seemed to have grown shorter still. He was almost elfin.

I never asked him directly, but comparing biographies it was clear that he was roughly 20 years my senior.

The dark shoulder-length hair was long gone. It was thinning noticeably and much lighter, and his forehead continued expanding northward. The lines on his face were etched a bit more deeply, too. He was never much of a smiler, but there was always a kindness and wisdom in his eyes. That hadn't changed. And in spite of the age and the thinning hair and the lines, he was as active as he's ever been. In many ways, he was a hell of a lot younger than I was.

"You're all alone," I said, looking around. "Is Norb coming?"

"He'll be along in a bit. He forgot something at this bar we were at last night, and was going back there first to pick it up."

Norb was his longtime associate and business partner, and a man who from my perspective deserved as much awe as Ronald. They'd been working together for nearly as long as I'd been alive. Norb and I had talked on the phone several times, but had only met face to face for the first time in 2002.

I opened the door and we stepped inside. The restaurant was much more crowded than I would've expected or liked, but we were still able to grab a table and sit down. Almost immediately I felt the kind of nervous twinge I felt the first time we met. I still had the deepest admiration for the things he'd done and continues to do. And to be honest, I still find it hard to believe that he'd actually make a point of getting together whenever he was in town. The most amazing (and humbling) thing of all to me was that he seemed to consider me a colleague of sorts. Granted, we were in two different businesses, he and I, but we encountered many of the same roadblocks, frustrations and tiny victories along the way. He's just been doing it for a lot longer than I have-yet there had never been the slightest condescension in his voice, nor any hint of ego.

We got caught up on our various projects, past and future, then moved on to the events of our private lives. I asked how his Thanksgiving had been-I knew he'd gone back to his hometown in the Deep South to visit his family.

"You know," he said, "when I left there in '68, '69, I thought it was this weird, freaky little town that I wanted to get away from. That's why I went to San Francisco-I wanted to go someplace that was real, that was part of the world."

"Uh-huh?" I said. It sounded familiar, though I was trying to remember a time when San Francisco might have ever seemed "real." Then again, if it's 1968 and you're in your late teens or early 20s and have spent your entire life in a small Southern town, well, it makes perfect sense.

"But going back there now," he went on, "I realize that everything's flip-flopped. That little town is what's real now. It is the rest of the country, and it's these small slivers along the coasts that have become the freaks."

"It sounds like my experience," I said. "When I was growing up, all my energy was directed at getting out of that backwater Wisconsin town and going someplace where something was happening. But every time I go home, I realize that?well, like you said."

"Making things stranger still was that I was down there for a week, then I went back to San Francisco for two days, then I came out here. So it's like a three-way culture clash. Hey-can you see my shirt?"

"Nope."

"It's camouflage. I bought it at a Wal-Mart down there specifically to wear when I was up here."

It sounded like something he'd do.

Norb showed up finally, sat down, and ordered. He's a much larger fellow than Ronald, but like Ronald still has (despite the gray beard) a youthful air about him.

The three of us talked about families, editing, bone cathedrals, the Mütter Museum and the home castration movement. None of it seemed in the least out of the ordinary. When the check came, I noticed the time. We'd been sitting there for nearly two and a half hours.

Before we left, Ronald slipped a camera out of his bag and asked if he could take my picture. "I like to keep a record of the people I'm seeing," he said. Normally I'd say no to such things, but this was different.

"Sure," I said. "Just keep talking so I know where to look."

"Oh, he won't do that," Norb said. "He prefers to be stealthy with that thing."

"There," Ronald said before Norb had even finished talking. Then he slipped the camera back in his bag, and we were on our way.