There is a song by Rodney Crowell entitled “Things I Wish I’d Said” that ends with this couplet:
No, I don’t have to live in dread
Over things I wish I’d said
You probably never heard of Rodney Crowell, or, if you have, it was likely due to something I wrote that undoubtedly puzzled you, since our tastes in music differ. But Rodney is a wordsmith as well as a tunesmith, and this song was written for his father on the occasion of his death. Rodney is giving thanks that he had enough time to say things to his father before it was too late. This piece is written in that spirit, both because I want to write it while you have the time to read it and because I hold you in the same sort of affection and esteem.
You and I have lived different lives over different eras, but have enjoyed a common overlap these past 40 years or so. I no longer can recall the exact moment when we first met, but it was sometime during my first decade of practice at a firm-to-firm meeting. It was undoubtedly a casual beginning, since you were much closer to my then senior partner, Dick Reed, and I was a young, but eager, pup in comparison to your status as grizzled veteran and firm leader. Nevertheless, something clicked between us even then, because I remember coming away impressed and wishing our two firms were one. I suspect it was your calm leadership and firmly held focus on your practice and its future. You’ve always been innovative and entrepreneurial, and that would have seemed unusual to me at the time, given my limited experience and the traditional atmosphere in which I toiled.
Whatever energy that first meeting sparked took awhile to blossom into something beyond mere admiration. When I finally realized a change was in order after 17 years of toiling in an unfertile field and had given notice to the firm I’d once led, my first call was to John. Since he and I are closer in age, it seemed more appropriate to me that I call him, but, in the back of my mind, your image hovered due to the homeliness and warmth of the firm you’d created. I did not know you then as I came to know you after we became partners, and you moved in a much more rarefied atmosphere than I did – an atmosphere so rarefied that it allowed you to tell John, after he’d reported the gist of my call, to call me back and tell me to “get your butt down here.”
And I did. I suppose I could pause here and say the rest was history, but even that call and the subsequent meeting in Portland two days later where we hammered out the terms of a partnership in which I became responsible for starting a new office of the firm in Seattle were not the true beginnings of our friendship. That moment had to wait.
It finally came on the plane to Calgary where we were headed to meet for the first time with some of the folks who would later become our Canadian allies. The theme of the trip was vintage ‘Bob’ – a venture into the unknown undertaken with curiosity, hope, and uncommon energy. It was perhaps the novelty of it all that caused me to ask, somewhere over eastern British Columbia, whether our divergent military backgrounds were going to be a problem. You see, I once had the head of a Portland-based firm tell me to get lost when he found out about my own history. He, a World War II veteran like you, hadn’t appreciated my public nose-thumbing at authority, caring nothing for the dread and angst it caused me, only the fact of its occurrence. So I was worried whether you might have the same reaction. As I said, I didn’t truly know you then.
So I was uneasy when I told you my personal history and asked if it was of any appreciable concern. Your response was immediate and unhesitant. You not only said that it wasn’t a problem, you said that you understood my actions and respected them. It was then that I asked you about the circumstances that earned you a Silver Star and received your then-standard 30 second response – the one that reduced 6 days and nights of encirclement and constant bombardment to a seeming hiccup. Even without any military experience, I recognized your statement for an evasion, instantly realizing you were still trying to put a terrible, evil experience behind you. While I didn’t yet realize how awful the experience had been, the paucity of your words spoke volumes.
I’ve always been stubborn. Whatever grades I earned in school, whatever success I’ve had at various endeavors, whatever understanding I’ve reached of the deeper things of life have all come because I worried at things until they made sense, like a bulldog with its favorite dead tennis ball. So I began worrying at your story, hoping to elicit more detail – both because I wanted to know, secondhand, more about something of which I had denied myself firsthand knowledge, and because I felt you would be much better off, much happier, if you were able to express yourself more fulsomely than you did on that plane ride to Calgary. The truth is that the latter thread was my principal reason for persistence, but I doubt I would have had the stamina to become the pest I became without exercising my innate curiosity.
But all of that is part of our shared history, and not worth further repetition here. We both know what came to pass – both in our own way, that is. I have no doubt that our own points of view about this story are as similar as they are different, as is so often the case in true friendships. And it doesn’t really matter how each of us tells the story, because, beyond any doubt, our respective tales always end in the same place – in friendship.
I suspect it was the trust we gained in one another by sharing our backgrounds in greater depth – very similar backgrounds in terms of our manner of growing up in times now lost to America, and so vastly different when it came to the subject of military service or the lack thereof. Without trust, there can be no friendship; without friendship, there can be no mentorship; without mentorship, there can be no commingling, no intermarriage, of thought and action. And we found all of that.
I think of us as a team. We haven’t always agreed, we haven’t always thought alike, both of us have had profound formative experiences that the other never had and can never really fully comprehend, and we’ve each lead separate lives in different, but similar, locations – but through it all there has always been an umbilical cord of shared thought, of common interest and goals, of friendship and respect, of mutual admiration and liking. That others were as much a part of our team as we were doesn’t much matter at this moment; this is my piece, my own attempt to make sense of our friendship and mutual respect. I have utter confidence that each of the others will try to do the same thing in their own way when the time comes for them to do so.
There is a poem by Dylan Thomas that sums up my feelings – no, not the one you are likely thinking of, though that one has much to say as well at this particular moment and sums your life up well. The one I am thinking of is entitled “Being But Men.” It goes like this:
Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.
If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.
Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.
That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.
Being but men, we walked into the trees.
I’d like to think that we did a bit of both together. God knows, you and I have felt the bark of trees on our shins often enough, surely more often than each of us liked; but each of us found and took the time to look around and wonder, as well. And we dreamed together for a time.
All things are possible in dreams, especially friendship. And I am thankful for ours; we both know how rare such a thing is and value it highly – beyond rubies, as the Proverb says. There is a vast gulf between acquaintanceship and friendship, and I am thankful that we explored and plumbed those depths. The journey to those depths has made my life so much more interesting, so much more rewarding, than it would otherwise have been. It was the leavening agent that allowed me to prosper in my profession.
With all the sincerity and love I am able to muster, I am – and will always remain – your friend,
Steve
