I wrote here a while back about a friend I’d lost touch with who has the annoying habit of writing a witty email every few years, engagingly asking for feedback or a favor.  The feedback is given, the favor done, and then years pass without a peep from him.  It has earned him the enmity of more than one person I know and I’ve been fairly disgusted by it.

He was recently in town and I mulled over responding to his insistent, twice sent email seeking to get together when he was in town.  I replied, mentioned surgery around the time he’d be in NY, he replied, uncharacteristically, and said he’d write more soon.  A few weeks passed, then his itinerary arrived, which I treated with a healthy dose of silence.    

A few days later I had a voicemail from him, arrived in NY hours earlier,  posing as my surgeon, inquiring about my recovery, trusting it was smooth and pain-free, then pleasantly telling me that he and his wife were at my service and would come to me at any time and place convenient for me.   I took another oxycodone and drifted off without calling back.   Seven hours later his next message arrived.  I mulled over listening to it, decided against it, watched TV, wrote a few emails, took more drugs, drifted off again.

“I can’t believe you didn’t listen to the message yet,” a friend said the next day.  I really wasn’t that curious.  I knew over time the messages would be tinged deeper and deeper with the hurt tones of someone forced to keep drinking their own medicine.  I thought about it, when I did think about it, as the 8 year-olds in Harlem used to, when a bully met someone who hurt him and was crying.   “Good for you,” they’d call out to the crying kid, while hiding their identities.  

I eventually sobered up, decided that my sadistic inaction, pleasant though it was, and justified as it might have been, was not of a piece with the gentle stance I have been trying to maintain.  I called him back, informed him that unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to get together with him and we proceeded to have a pleasant chat.  It turned out the infinite flexibility would all occur on a certain day, the day before they left, and that was a complicated day for me.  If there was any question of exerting myself to get together with them, the limited time frame made it impossible.  

But all this tedious background is for this.  He told me at one point, as we discussed my animation program that has just crept its first fins on to land and is about to close up the gills and breathe air for the first time, that he’d been in a one-day animation workshop in a summer program in a San Francisco art museum as a boy and had never forgotten it. 

“I remember almost nothing from before I was about 14,” he said, “but I have vivid memories of how cool it was, at ten, to draw these crude things on cels and then see them played back as animation.  I remember sitting in the auditorium at the end of the program and watching the animation I’d done on a big screen, and how amazing and exciting it was.  I remember it 45 years later, and almost nothing else from that time in my life.  So it made a huge impression and I’m sure the kids lucky enough to be in your workshop will have a similar experience.”

Wow, I thought.  What a great little sound byte to record and use to promote the program.  

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s been great talking to you.  We’ve missed you and are sad we won’t get to see you, but we understand, it’s a short trip and your operation and all.  But,” and his voice got very tender and sincere “let’s stay in touch.  You know, we should email and talk on the phone once in a while.”  He sounded, for all the world,  like a person who actually did these kinds of things and I managed to say “sure, that would be nice,” instead of laughing in his face and telling him how hilarious he was.

“Oh, listen, send me your latest animations, I love them.  And I’ll send you feedback and stay in touch,” he said, and again I managed not to spoil the mood by guffawing like a donkey.

The next day I sent him the latest animations with a short note about his great story of being a ten year-old animator for a day.  I told him the story would make a great promo and suggested we get a recording of him telling it.   I let him know how nice it was to hear from him.  

That was only two weeks ago.  It’s not that I expect to hear back from him, I just think it’s another great example of the puckish nature of the world, if you look at it the right way.