Friends

Is it written that when we say “friends”, we mean old friends, maybe even the deceased ones? (Où sont les amis d’antan?). I suppose that at 78, I should recognize the depressing actuarial fact that many of my friends from the 60’s and earlier should have gone on before me, especially with the losses of the aids disaster.

But Mark and I still have friends, by the dozen I would say, yet somehow we don’t take their pictures in the profusion that I did when I was most photographically active, in spite of the omnipresence nowadays of the cell-phone camera. Of course, two of our very closest friends have become family, I mean the Ladies in Greene, so they are to be seen on another page.

	By any count, my oldest friend is Cathryn Granville, as she was when I first met her, now Káča. We met at Tottenville High School, Fall term, and it was only that one term that she was at THS. But we had hit it off so well that we’ve maintained contact since then with only a few interruptions. The first batch of pictures of Cathryn and me date to that autumn and winter. Unfortunately, few of the snaps are of very good photographic quality: over- or under-exposed, blurry, the negatives somewhat damaged in the intervening 65 years. But see what you can make of them on the page that I’ve devoted to them.
	It was less than a year after meeting Káča that I met Bill Elliott. At boy-scout camp, if you please. For me it was a life-saver to find someone with similar interests to mine, especially piano (though he was a far better musician than I would ever be), but there was also astronomy and kid-level chemistry that united us. He was fun, with an off-beat sense of humor, and an open exuberant personality that was a good counterbalance to my shyness and reserve. We were each other’s best friend through high-school, and maybe even into our college years, though we never were students at the same school. In late winter of 1972, he had hit a bad time, and I got a call from him, asking me to put him up at my place in Providence. On this page, there are a bunch of portraits I did of him in those days.
	It was the Winter and Spring 1972 when Bill was staying with me. And during this period some time, Káča came to visit for a weekend, a respite from New York, where she was working at the time. We took an hour or so one evening to take pictures in various comical poses. As long as I had already known the two of them, I can’t recall any earlier time that they had met each other. It was no surprise, though, that they hit it off immediately. On this page, some selections from that photo shoot.
	At Christmas-time 1967, Bill Elliott and I visited the family of John Fogarty, a buddy from graduate-school days. He and Anne, who was an equally old friend, were living at the time in Cheyney, Pennsylvania. There are only four usable pictures from that visit, beyond this diagonal one, which you may see a bigger version of. But go to the page to see the snapshots.
	A newer friend, Don Higgins, I met in 1969. We never spent much time with each other, but he sometimes visited Rhode Island from New York, and occasionally put me up at his place in Chelsea when I went down there. Unfortunately, I have very few pictures of him, all from the earliest days of our friendship, but you can see them on a page devoted to him.