With friends like these

Gregor phones. He is upset. “Yesterday Sal wrote a threepage letter to my dad seeking to formally end their friendship,” he says.

The friendship being formerly ended is one that began over 70 years ago. Sal is one of his dad Milt’s oldest friends. He is also, according to Milt, a brilliant scholar. And so the breakup letter is annotated, making use of long quoted passages from their correspondences and, much like a legal deposition, contains numbered sections and lettered subsections.

Sal outlines the various ways in which Milt has let him down over the decades. But among the grievances is my podcast, Heavyweight. It seems Milt had sent Sal the episode in which Gregor appears. And Sal hated it, hated the fact that Milt was inconsiderate enough to waste his time with, what he called, “chit chat.”

“I kind of agree with him,” Gregor says. “It is just two guys talking to each other.”

I suppose I understand. Sal’s a scholar in his late 80s. He wants to curate his time carefully. That I’d played a minor role in their friendship’s undoing made the sting of my dolefulness especially poignant. “You must see the irony in this whole situation,” I say.

After waiting a good long while, it’s made clear to me that Gregor does not see the irony in this whole situation. So I elaborate. “The Raison d’être of my podcast is to bring people together and here I’ve torn people apart.”

“You’re a regular Henry Kissinger,” he says. “A hairless Henry Kissinger.”

I ask if there’s anything I can do to help, and Gregor suggests we conference in his dad and make the case for reconciliation. Like all Jewish men of a certain age, Milt hasn’t answered a telephone in close to fifty years. And so his wife Etta answers the phone. “They’ve already made up,” she says.

Although, Etta assures us, they’ll be back to fighting in no time. It turns out that Sal writes a letter like this to Milt every few years.

“People talk about the relationship to a mother, a wife. But the relationship with a buddy can sometimes be even more deep and complicated,” she says.

Gregor and I are a prime example of that. And it often feels like we’re not going to make it through the next 70 minutes, let alone 70 years. But as a person grows older, he or she needs more friends, not less. Because if not for friends, who would we have to fight with?