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I would have celebrated both David’s life and our friendship.
I would have told of a friendship that began in grammar school’s
first grade and lasted the 65 years until his death. I would have
recalled that so many years earlier, before social media and
internet and cellphones, most friends went different ways after
high school’s end and gradually lost touch but David and I found
our bond worth the effort to maintain it.
I smoked my first cigarette with him, got drunk for the first
time with him, smoked my first joint with him. When I married
he was my Best Man.
David loved to tell stories and to tell them again many, many
times. My sons could recite some verbatim. He and I laughed
together at the old stories no matter how many times they were
told.
I wonder which stories I might have told in a eulogy. How
would I have chosen from so many?
Perhaps I would have described his frantic efforts to
convince me to get out of the car when we arrived my wedding;
he could not know I was just fooling around. Maybe I would have
recounted the scene a decade later when, grumbling and
mumbling, one morning he entered the warm kitchen of our
ancient uninsulated New Hampshire farmhouse after a winter’s
night in our extra bedroom, his wool cap pulled down to his
eyebrows, his heavy coat zipped to its highest reach, his hands
gloved, his shoulders hunched. His complaint of the cold room
was met with a tongue-in-cheek reference to a lack of manhood,
only later recanted when I found the heat to his room had been
inadvertently closed off, my friend left to suffer the near zero
temperature. Or I might have recalled an episode a number of
years after that when he and I beat my two sons in touch football
after which, standing there naked and helpless, he needed my
wife to physically help him into a hot bath.
I certainly would have described his great concern for all of
his many friends, his worry when things were difficult for them,
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