<strong>By John Krull</strong>
ST. LOUIS, Mo.
Few things fit so comfortably or wear so well as an old friendship.
My buddy Jim and I sit in the same booth in the same bar where we first began gathering more than 35 years ago, when we were in grad school together. We sip our beers, catching up, swapping stories, laughing easily and often.
We’re both old, settled and respectable now.
There was a time, though, when we roamed around this river city on my motorcycle or in his ’67 Volkswagen Beetle. We closed some places down and, a time or two, didn’t make it back home until the sun was coming up.
We were a couple of shaggy roughs then, all angles and edges, young men trying to figure out and find their ways in the world. We shared a love of books and ideas, an attraction to smart, confident and capable women — we each ended up marrying two of the smartest, most confident and most capable women in the world — and a hunger for experience.
Some of the connection was deeper than that.
We were both the eldest children — the eldest sons — of what people in those days referred to as “broken” homes. We both had gone to work early, earning steady paychecks before we were old enough to drive. We both had learned young when to talk and when to keep our mouths shut, particularly around people who made judgments about things they didn’t understand.
There was a lot we didn’t have to explain to each other.
Always has been, for that matter.
I was a kind of renegade Protestant, an Indiana guy who came from a small Baptist college and saw St. Louis with a stranger’s eyes.
Jim is a St. Louis native, an Irish-Catholic boy who knew and knows this city like the beat of his own heart.
When we first met, he told me the secret to understanding St. Louis was realizing it was a very old city and that people’s stories here could reach back not just decades, but centuries. The next night, I chatted with a young woman who let slip that her ancestors had settled in the area in the 1700s.
And I knew I had come to a special place.
So it went.
Jim knew the history.
I saw the mystery.
Together, we found the magic in the familiar.
When we hung out, the laughs came often, the talks were frank, and the silences easy and companionable.
By day and into the early evening, we took and taught classes, jousting intellectually with the Jesuits who were our professors and fellow students, and scrambled after other part-time jobs the university prohibited but were the only things that kept us above the poverty line.
By night, we hung out with friends or traipsed around the city, engaging in bull sessions or flirting with the fairer sex in bars like this one.
Good days.
Good years.
Time passed. We moved forward, never without effort and often with setbacks.
When grad school ended, I came back to Indiana, launched my career and eventually married.
Jim stayed in St. Louis and built his life here.
We don’t see each other as often we’d like. We both have commitments, responsibilities, lives.
But, when we do, the laughs come often, the talks are frank, and the silences easy and companionable.
We talk now about our lives and our families. We tell variations of jokes that have amused us for nearly 40 years. We lift our pints to friends, acquaintances and former teachers who have passed. We lament the closing and disappearance of places where we spent our scrambling days.
“They didn’t even put up plaques in our honor,” I jest.
And we laugh.
So many things change with time.
But some things don’t.
Experience and gravity have left their marks on both of us.
We’re both old, settled and respectable now.
My buddy Jim and I sit in the same booth in the same bar where we first began gathering more than 35 years ago. We sip our beers, catching up, swapping stories, laughing easily and often.
Few things fit so comfortably or wear so well as an old friendship.
<em>John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. Send comments to [email protected].</em>
