Housekeeping Note :My Best Friend
This afternoon, I received a letter in the mail — the real mail — that immediately became my favorite letter of all the ones that I’ve ever received (barring the life-determining ones: “I love you”; “enclosed find my check…”). The writer is a brilliant boy, five going on six, whom I met last summer, when he was four not-so-quite going on five. He and his parents and his little sister and I had a glorious summer afternoon together, mostly in Central Park, but also back here at the apartment, to which we all repaired, eager to cool off. It was in that last hour that my fondness for the young man settled, amidst negotiations about jumping and/or crawling on the sofa, into lifelong affection.
Which was easy for me to imagine: I knew that I’d never forget our afternoon. But what about him? It didn’t seem possible that one so young could possibly remember the day, much less me, brains (even brilliant ones) being brains. As someone whose memories of childhood are still haunted by fragmentary recollections of interesting but nameless adults (interesting, undoubtedly, because they didn’t stick around), I knew how transitory I must be for my new friend, and how unlikely it was that his teeming brain would or could remember our day together.
How to make a more lasting impression! I asked his parents if I might send postcards from the Museum’s collection of “Thirty Treasures” — artworks both august and execrable. Permission granted, I meant to send a postcard a week, but it took well over a year to go through the booklet. I didn’t have to be too careful about what I wrote, because I could count on parental censorship. I did feel obliged to apologize, however, for the last message, which expressed a wish that the recipient would grow up to possess, some day, a Hockney of his own. I didn’t, as I explained to his father, mean that I hoped that he would grow up to manage a hedge fund.
Eventually, the thirtieth card dropped into the mailbox, and I promised to find another set of postcards. The other day, I came home with two: a set of black-and-white Gotham photographs that dates from 2000 (the best of both worlds?) and a collection of pages from illuminated manuscripts. The New York pictures are obviously cool, but they’re not so cool that my friend may not already possess them. (He’s cool.) The illuminated manuscripts, on the other hand — what was I thinking? The Madonna is either singing a Magnificat or standing at the foot of the cross. I could get arrested!
The letter that I received today, a genuine young person’s letter — I could hear the voicing of parental suggestions, but I was sure that the writer had at no point been ghosted — did more to convince me that I know my place in the world than any letter that I’ve ever opened. To say that I felt extraordinarily lucky would be an understatement. And also a misstatement: there was nothing lucky about my writing thirty postcards. Nothing lucky, perhaps; but a great deal of pleasure.
It’s an open secret around here that I am keen to become a grandfather. Perhaps within the next year! I say this only to make it clear that my friend is not a surrogate. He is not a grandchild, or a nephew, or a long-lost godson. He is a friend. And right now, there’s no one with whom I’d rather stay in touch.