I was listening to Gimon& Sarfunkle recently and one of my favorite songs came on:

Old friends, old friends:
Sat on their park bench like bookends.
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes
of the old friends.
Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sun.
The sounds of the city, sifting through trees,
Settles like dust on the shoulders of the old friends.
“Can you imagine us years from today?
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy!”
Old friends, memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears…
“Time it was & what a time it was! It was:
a time of innocence, a time of confidences.
Long ago it must be; I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.”

I wish I had had the opportunity to dissect this in a poetry class. To me, the beauty of the poetry mirrors the beauty of the subject: friendship. I see a central-park-esque scene (influenced by the fact that the album I first heard this on was the Concert in Central Park) and two teens or twenty-somethings (maybe older) walking, passing two seventy-somethings (maybe younger). The two couples look upon each other with familiarity: each is the other, or was the other, or will be the other.

The segments that are (or seem to me to be) spoken are their conversations: first the younger couple, with and to each other but at the same time with and to the older couple. There is only one thread of thought, but these are friends, & who says each word may not be the same as who says the word that came before. Then, the older couple, in the same respect. The two older (men in the song, but it need not be) friends discuss with themselves what a time it was! while at the same time warning the younger friends that this! this is the time, the time that will be the time that was.

Aristotle is credited with saying that a friend is a soul who dwells in two bodies. Today, remember the other pieces of your soul. The men & women who you talk to every day, or who you don’t, the men & women who you count as true friends. I remember friends who, even if we haven’t spoken for years, I could sit with in comfortable silence, sharing thoughts, on a park bench, or on a walk through a park. Friends whose houses I don’t knock at, but simply open the door, and who likewise feel at home in mine. Friends who may now be only memories, but all the more special for their absence.