I’m out on Long Island, NY, where I’ve spent a couple of weeks visiting my friend, Tom, who was my neighbor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 25 years ago, when we were both childless, unmarried and young.

Well, I was in my early-30’s. Tom and his roommates were recent college grads, starting their careers in the biggest city in the world. NYC was spectacular and singularly massive at the turn of the millennium. We were intoxicated and alive.

Tom is younger than me by seven years. In the time since I saw him last, he climbed the ladder in two separate career paths that crashed due to financial crises and has now climbed the ladder in a third: wine and spirits. He is an accomplished and successful Director of middle management.

He’s raised three children and supported his mother, and theirs. His father passed away; and his brother, an Iraq War vet, committed suicide.

Tom tracked me down four years ago after his father died. He told me he thought a necklace I gave him, cursed him. It brought him so much bad luck.

I arrived in mid-January in sub-freezing temperatures, we spent a few days catching up, and I promptly threw the necklace into the ocean on the outgoing tide.

Close readers of this blog will remember when I threw the accursed necklace into the sea, but click the Tom and the Opera link and read about it if you haven’t.

When we reconnected, Tom and I had both just lost our fathers. His brother died some years before, and I have since lost my sister. We are brethren at mid-life. We often have half-hour to hour long phone conversations about enduring this world in our times. Since we reconnected, I’ve tried to give my friend a way to separate himself from his troubles.

In the last two and a half years, I showed up to help Tom move into his post-divorce apartment – when we went to the Metropolitan Opera for Rigoletto from center box seats. I flew him to Amsterdam for a four day vacation before the first ‘Thanksgiving and Xmas with split households’. And I paid for him to go to Africa to build a school with his daughter and her classmates.

I’ve also treated us to several lush meals in diverse locations. The latest was at Blackstone here on Long Island. We had really delicious oysters from Canada, tuna sashimi, a Vietnamese-spring-roll-style sushi roll, lump crab, and a tomahawk Wagyu steak. I had a beaujolais. Tom had the banana cream pie.

It’s a fine dining restaurant in an area of strip malls. The interior was made to feel old-school, wooden, warm. Yet, the exterior is contemporary suburban monoculture – sigh, I guess that’s everywhere now. Here though, they take things they want and put them together for the convenience and then make them at the highest quality available in the same place … good steakhouse and good sushi, has emerged. The fish was fresh, prepared very well. The steak, unique, delicious.

Spending time with Tom has been exorbitant fun, controlled chaos and a good re-bonding experience. I know we’ve been helpful to each other, though we don’t discuss it. I worried about him when things were looking bad, I don’t now.

Tom, like many New Yorkers, does for himself and his own, but won’t ask for assistance. He will take what’s offered without guilt and enjoy it lustfully, which I find fun and uplifting. Until it’s not. Then he gets arrogant and deaf.

I was walking through Golden Gate Park two weeks ago when my cel flashed, indicating my phone was ringing. Seeing it was Tom, I answered.

“Thought you were coming out this summer, ” he said.

I told him I got busy with a three week, 2200 mile road trip to drive my beloved car Sylvie out west.  Tom said:

“Well, there’s only Labor Day pool party left, unless you want to come New Year’s Eve for Phish.”

I put the phone down, bought a one-way ticket to JFK, booked a hotel in Long Beach for a week, and bought tickets for Arthur Ashe Stadium at the U. S. Open tennis grand slam.

It had been a year and eight months since we hung out and I knew I wouldn’t make NYE in NY. I rationalized, too, that Tom wanted me to visit so I could see that he’s cool now and things are going well.

I had been trying to help get him away from it all to process his thoughts. That’s why I took him to Amsterdam and the Opera and supported his travel to Africa – to wholly extricate him from his own life as a break.

Our meals in Manhattan, in Amsterdam and here, are all, in part, a separation from our lives – to talk deeply about things that matter. I was thrilled to help him travel with his daughter and their class to Senegal.

The Labor Day Pool Party at Tom’s townhouse in Lido is the final party at the pool before it’s closed for the off-season. All the families and friends of families enjoy swimming, food, drinks, music, a raffle, and the most important events: games!

The table tennis and cornhole tournaments are highly anticipated and competitive. Yet from the moment I arrived, Tom told me, “I’m winnin’ that.”

He crowed to every neighbor we saw for two days that he was winning the cornhole tournament. It got so ridiculous, at one point when we were alone in the car, I said, “Yo, man, you are talkin’ a lotta smack about this cornhole thing.”

Now cornhole, like shuffleboard, requires team play. I know these tournaments use random selection for team mates. How could he possibly guarantee he’d win? But the thing about Tom is …

It was done and dusted.

That’s something Tom gives me – and I think he gives it to everyone he knows – chutzpah.

It was a great time. I saw Tom’s mom and family. We all jumped in the pool together at the end of the party, by tradition. The food was great. Lovely day, wonderful people. I felt welcomed.

So for my contribution on this trip, I took Tom to the USTA Center in Flushing for a match at the U.S. Open Grand Slam tennis tournament, something he and his neighbors would never do.

I grew up with tennis because of my Indian parents. Tom’s people prefer hockey, football, basketball and baseball. I know I expand Tom’s cultural landscape, as I know he expands mine.

Through luck of the draw we got a match featuring perhaps the greatest tennis champion ever, Novak Djokovic, and, in a stunning upset, Nolé was defeated by Australian Alexei Popyrin.

I concluded it was because of fatigue from playing in every previous Grand Slam Final and then meeting in the Olympic Gold Medal match that Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz, world number two and one respectively, were eliminated in the early rounds at New York.

Apparently the men’s endurance limit is four championship tournament finals. But it was pretty cool to see Nolé combat the Aussie Popyrin at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

By contrast to my material gifts, Tom has been  generous with things that have no calculable value, including counsel and trusted conversation. He has picked me up, dusted me off and demanded I go at it again more than once.

On brief occasions, over the last four years, we’ve enjoyed food, wine, weed and travel as single men in mid-life.

We’ve shared meals and conversations and consulted one another on these occasions, separate from our responsibilities, to decide how we will make our way. He has lifted my spirit and confidence. This is priceless.

Tom has introduced me to his friends and family, who keep a tight circle. I am, for the first time, meeting his oldest friends and the people he has known for four decades, a community within which he is now the eldest surviving male of his family.

We both battle depression under the weight of our self-perception. We both do it in solitude, often not sharing it with anyone else.

Instead of staying in the city and visiting for a night,  I’ve come out to LI to stay in Long Beach, with Tom for a couple of nights and in local hotels .

It’s now the season they call “locals summer,” when the tourists leave and the weather is pleasant and locals get to enjoy what the island has to offer before it gets too cold. It is a lovely, peaceful beach town now.

Long Island’s a place that has been described so often by others that it’s hard to put it in original terms anymore. From The Great Gatsby to Jaws to Everybody Loves Raymond, the literary, artistic, social, and now digital, presence of the place masks the reality.

The reality, which I am gaining an understanding of through Tom and his community and my extended visit to the area, is private, energetic, vibrant and physical. Long Beach is more diverse than I imagined. Other areas of Long Island are not.

Meanwhile, many helicopters and private planes still pass by the beach and overhead daily – shuttling the wealthy back and forth between the City and the Hamptons, or Montauk or wherever.

It’s half-September.

Many of my friendships have faded because all I do is get really close to people and then leave disgusted with where I am. For example, I could never live here.

New York remains a place that repels and attracts. I hate the way people look at me here for my long hair and wearing bright colors. I feel an almost constant basic racism of otherness. It’s a famously white and restricted place that demands you behave to belong.

My unwillingness to be treated less than for being exactly who I am has meant friends have faded from my frame of reference away into their own lives.

Now, at mid-life, some old ones re-appear. I find they are younger than me by just a few years and they are all going through what mid-life brings us: break-ups and deaths and a powerful existential energy.

The French call it “l’energie d’age.” Which is such a better term than “mid-life crisis.”

This was a really cool kite flown at Long Beach, Long Island

Since I’m on the East coast, I decided to try and see some other friends who, like Tom, reconnected with me just after Dad died, in that fateful Spring when the pandemic plunged us all into various solitudes.

These friends, a married couple with two sons in college, have been dealing with enormous soulache from numerous deaths in their family and community, including a fraternal suicide and a very recent loss to cancer.

The emotional weight of it is staggering. But when I saw them I was inspired by their resilience. It falls to us, in our 50’s to bear and manage the circumstances. We’re the adults now.

My rediscovered friends here on the East coast impress me deeply with their strength and fiercely organized approach to the spiritual and practical demands of mourning. They press on.

Though busy with funerals and memorial services, they were able to break away for a couple of days to spend time at a forested property in New Hampshire, where we had a good walk in the woods.

and lovely vistas of trees.

Though the visit was short, it was affirming. It’s good to trust others again.

When we returned from New Hampshire, I was in a suburb of Boston, with time on my hands. This gave me the opportunity to visit Fenway Park, the oldest major league stadium and a baseball-lover’s bucket-list destination.

This was indescribably wonderful. It’s an intimate place where they adore baseball. You can read about my first trip to Fenway on Giants Baseball Corner, my baseball blog, if you click that link.

and here are the Red Sox fans, in their glorious baseball Ashram, enjoying their song, Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond:

And here are some stills of Boston I took from the windows of various cabs:

I also managed to sneak in a visit to MFA Boston, the Museum of Fine Art which is, remarkably, open until 10pm on Thursdays and Fridays. I’m sure Friday it’s packed, but to have that place all to myself on a Thursday for four and a half hours was fantastic.

I will write a separate blog about that when I get a chance. Here’s the train back from Boston:

Meanwhile just xilling on Long Island: