Today is the sixty-seventh birthday of my longtime close friend, many considered us best friends, which was fair enough.   After his wife flew into a rage at me during a tense vacation, he dragged her in to apologize to me.  This humiliated her, even though I accepted her crabbed apology, gave her the hug she asked for and kissed her.  She doubled down on her right to be inconsiderate with a well-placed bit of thoughtlessness the next day, and I reacted with a few seconds of anger I quickly apologized to everyone for.  

The aftermath was a long, torturous year-long impasse, a deliberation over whether I could ever be forgiven for the brutal way I’d used the “f-word”, long stretches of silence from them, a few breaks for angry meetings.  Attempts to repair our long friendship finally ended with his wife convincing all of our mutual friends, and their own children, that I was unloving and unforgiving, and no doubt worse things.  

To my shock, every one of them seemed to unquestioningly accept her creative account of our estrangement and her assassination of my character, or at least keep their distance.  As for their children, I’m sure the practical matter of their parents’ demand for loyalty, their mother’s unrestricted emotional prerogatives and their inheritance also play a role in their silence.

I knew nothing about this campaign of distortion, sensed nothing amiss with any of my other old friends, until a warm, dear friend of fifty years called, upset with me. She angrily lectured me about being unloving and unforgiving, deliberately torturing dear lifelong friends who only wanted my love and forgiveness.

I called my friend, the birthday boy, told him he had to correct these lies.  He had studied, and taken very seriously, treatises by a Jewish scholar on the harm of “the evil tongue” false gossip that destroys somebody’s good name.  He immediately promised to make things right.  

He called me an hour later to tell me he’d talked to everyone I’d asked him to call (there were two couples I’d mentioned) and taken care of my concerns.  He may have talked to them, but he corrected none of his wife’s defamatory claims.  His truthfulness was no longer something I could count on.

Months later I’d wind up ostracized by a large group of our mutual friends, all claiming to take no side, all professing equal love for everyone, all making it very clear that it was impossible to forgive somebody who can’t forgive.  Forgive for what?  I asked, but this feigned ignorance just proved what a liar I am, for I clearly knew good and goddamned well what I was childishly refusing to forgive.

This is my happy birthday to that sorry fucking worm. An enraged two year-old, still, at the ripe old age of 67. Many more, old boy.