For Boyd — Across the Distance
My oldest, dearest Boyd, Time has tried its clever tricks on us — laid out maps between our footsteps, stacked fifty winters like quiet books between one porch light and another. And yet — I have never felt you closer. Not in the geography of it all — not in airports, not in highways, not in the long arithmetic of calendars — but in the steady interior room where certain friendships live. You have been there like a familiar chord beneath a song,
like the low hum of memory that steadies a restless heart. We have grown older in different sunlight, weathered different storms, laughed in separate kitchens, carried separate burdens — but somehow the thread never thinned.
Distance never learned how to measure us. It could not count the shared boyhood mischief, the half-finished sentences, the look that said you know exactly what I mean.
Fifty years apart — and still I feel you in the marrow of things.
When I remember who I was, you are there.
When I consider who I am, you are still there.
Some friendships are seasonal — bright, then gone.
Ours has been tectonic. Slow. Deep. Unmoving beneath the surface while continents shift above it.
My dear Boyd, if the miles taught us anything it is this:
Closeness is not proximity. It is recognition. And I have always recognized you — across every decade, across every silence, across every stretch of sky between us. Here’s to the quiet miracle of a friendship that never needed tending to keep blooming. With all the love that fifty years cannot thin — Always, Joel � � �