There are things we say, thinking they are everything we need to say.   A year or more later, sometimes, we realize there was something important we should have added, but left out.

I’m thinking about this, oddly, as I begin to keep a Gratitude Journal.   I’ve written down about, well, let’s see, 28 things I feel gratefulness about so far, collected last night during a long train ride home.  I hope to form the habit of noting my good fortune, and increasing my ability to see the small miracles that are quite common, but easy to miss if you’re not looking for them.  The love between that child and his mother on the train the other day, for example.  Or the fleeting smile on the face of the tough guy on the other side of the subway car when he saw the same thing I was smiling about, a second before he put his mask back on.

Out of the blue recently I thought of a missed chance to add a sentence or two when I should have, and it haunts me slightly that I didn’t add the important sentiment I realize now was missing from my answer.   Sometimes, in the effort to come to the point smartly, the larger point is missed.

An old friend was in town, a very talented musician and wonderful improviser, someone I love to play music with.   He was moving to the other side of the world, I don’t know if he was truly happy about it, but he was gamely moving to the other side of the world.   It would be a long time, if ever, until I saw him again.   

He and I had a mutual friend, a very good friend for many years, famously demanding and difficult.  This friend was increasingly unhappy as the years went by, and critical, and humorless. His demand for attention, inflexibility and inability to listen made him more and more difficult to be around.   He called at the worst times and always needed to have a long conversation, he always had a long, usually aggravating, story he needed to tell.  He was angry when he was not depressed, and expressed his disgust at a series of betrayals that began to look eerily identical.  He fought about being angry, claimed he was not at all angry.  Although he was extremely intelligent, quite talented and had other good qualities, those things became harder and harder to see.  The relationship became toxic to me and it finally came to a head in the weeks after my father died.  

I’d tried valiantly to have a better friendship with him, over literally several years, long letters, long conversations, but in the end I could not save the relationship.   We brought out the worst in each other and it was time to stop being  constantly reminded of what he considered my failures, hearing over and over about his endlessly repeating betrayals at the hands of virtually everyone he met.  His mother was very understanding of my position in the end and asked helplessly what, if anything, she could do to help him.

My friend the musician was in NY visiting an old friend who has always been an older brother to him.  He and his wife stayed with this old friend on the eve of their move to the other side of the world and while they were in town I was invited to join them for a quick lunch and then, a day or two later, to spend an afternoon walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with them.  

At the end of that nice walk, as we drove up the West Side Highway, my friend mentioned he was probably going to visit this former friend of mine.  They’d been out of touch a long time, he said, but he was planning to drop in.  I told him and his wife that the guy would be delighted to see them, lived in a beautiful place they should not miss while touring America, would surely show them a good time.  

The driver, my friend’s older brother, smiled at me from the rear view mirror and asked me pleasantly why it was I’d stopped being friends with him.  I smiled back and said “Truthfully, I came to realize we brought out the worst in each other.”  And that was that.  I never heard from any of them again.

I might have added that it pained me greatly to have things come to that sad end after decades of friendship, and that I’d tried mightily, and made every effort to improve things.  I might have spent five seconds to impress on them how seriously I take friendship, that I am not the categorical, black and white hanging judge who cuts off an old friend the way saying “we brought out the worst in each other” might have made me seem.   Probably would have changed nothing, but I regret not adding that bit of my humanity as my character was being weighed.

Truthfully, it was long in dawning on me that I was on a kind of trial in that moment.