Posts Tagged ‘Absent Friends’

Sister Frances has an expression that has always held true…if you want to know who your friends are, ask them to help you move.  Not only has it held true, but when I first became a nun, someone I had only seen at Sunday services, someone whom I barely knew, showed up on moving day and simply said, “I heard you are moving, I’m hear to help.”

That is a true friend…

But there are many other types of friends that pass through our lives, making impressions – and to them I raise a cigar (if only a virtual one at the moment) with a cheer of “Absent friends!”.  Why a cigar? Thereby lies a tale…

One of the friends  I had once we shall call Harry Yablan, mostly because that’s his name.  I doubt Harry is reading this at the moment because when I asked Harry about the internet his typical reply was, “the internet is a place for scammers to scam other scammers.”   While I don’t agree with Harry, I will say that there was, believe it or not, a time of my life when my hands rarely touched a keyboard that wasn’t connected to a word processor – and the time in my life when I knew Harry was one of those times.

For those of you who still have an imagination, and have not been bereft of it by game developers who are wont to do our imagining for us, think of that place where you have been most comfortable.  Now add to that place a ray of warm sunshine and perhaps even in your pet sleeping in the sun.  Now surround yourself with good friends and good conversation – that was Harry’s Place.  

Harry’s place was more than a cigar shop, it was a cross roads of humanity. More, it was a symposium for conversation, wit and philosophy that even the great Plato would have been proud to call a second home.  Some people have back fences, others have bowling allies, I had Harry’s place. I can think of no other place where I would be able to spend an evening with an Air force combat pilot, the Chief of Patrolmen for the City of Chicago (retired), the commissioner of Streets and Sanitation for the City of Chicago (retired), and a rabbinical student all in the same room. Each night Harry would put on a fresh pot of coffee, cigars and pipes would be lit with carefully practiced precision and ceremony, and the couches surrounding the big screen television would be occupied by people from all walks of life.

This is the point at which some of our readers may be looking for a tie in with gaming.  For those of you who need a moral, a lesson or some such purpose other than the simple conveyance of a feeling and tribute to absent friends, here it is…

In one of the Star Trek Movies (I will let you look up which one) Spock’s brother tries to heal Captain Kirk’s emotional pain.  The famous captain immediately protests, saying, “I need my pain, its part of who I am.”  Whether memories are painful, pleasant or simply the remembrance of a feeling, they are part of who we are.  John F. Kennedy once said, “The knowledge of the past prepares us for the events of the future.”  In a very real way that includes all our memories. Like Captain Kirk said, it’s part of who we are.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather