Los Gatos Weekly-Times

We walked and talked, and we were friends

By Carl Heintze

I want to tell you about my friend George. George and I knew one another for 40 years. We worked at the same place and that's how we got acquainted, but that alone wasn't what made us friends. In truth, it's hard for me to explain how we became friends and why we stayed that way. In many ways we were very different. I talked a lot, George listened.

The one thing we had in common was walking. We both liked to hike and we hiked a lot. We walked through almost every county park on the San Francisco Peninsula, some in the East Bay and a few trails in Yosemite. Nothing much happened on these walks. We puffed along, not saying much, but just enjoying the sights and one another's company.

We walked because we were friends. American men sometimes have a difficult time with friendship. They make friends where they work, but often the friendship doesn't transcend the workplace. American men also seem to have hale fellow, well met friendships which depend on golf, beer, football games or some other trappings of camaraderie.

But it wasn't like that with George and me. We just walked and talked. Eventually, as we got older, we didn't walk as much. We took to having lunch one day a week. We never ate in fancy places, but our lunches became a kind of institution. Our wives sometimes wondered what we talked about. The truth was we didn't talk about much of anything.

We didn't talk about our wives at all. We never told dirty jokes, as do some men when not in the company of women. We each had a couple of subjects apiece that we liked to trot out now and then for re-examination. George's favorite was what I guess you'd call show business.

He loved show tunes and over the years he amassed a collection of 300 or more tapes of Broadway and movie scores. He also remembered a vast number of episodes from early television series. When he was younger, George had been an amateur thespian and in many ways, I suppose, he was a frustrated actor.

I don't know where all this came from. George grew up during the Depression. He was in the Civilian Conservation Corps before he enlisted in the Air Force. He went around the world with the 20th Air Force, but he never made much of it; in fact, he had to be prodded to talk about the war at all.

He liked to write and he wrote well, but it wasn't all-consuming. It was a way to make a living and he made it in a quiet, unassuming way.

George also liked good food well served with pleasant ambiance. Eating had certain elements of a ritual with him . He hated a bad meal, hastily served.

Once we went to a place called a "mini-gourmet." After we came out, he said, "Mini must have been out."

For him a meal had to be leisurely, preceded if possible by a libation of some kind. Last year he celebrated his wedding anniversary that way. Then he went home to bed and never woke up.

I thought his death was pretty much like his life. It hurt, but it was accomplished with a minimum of bother, it was carried out with grace and it made one feel he had done what he had to do and it was time to go.

But I miss him. I can't tell you all the ways I miss him, certainly not as much as his family, but in all the ways that good friends miss one another. There's no one around that matches that 40 years of shared experience. There's no one left who is as patient about listening when I want to reminisce. The walks just aren't the same anymore. It's just no fun walking alone.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.