Jim

I was feeling grouchy when I woke this morning. I didn’t sleep well and I’m still having some chemotherapy-related problems. I lay in bed looking at the alarm clock wondering why I should bother to get out of bed.

What the hell, I thought. It’s just going to be more of the same. Get up, get tired, go to bed, get up again, write for a while, then get tired again. What’s the point?

Sometimes that’s the way I feel. I have to force myself to write. When I write, nothing seems to work out. The thought of eating is enough to make me gag. I’m impatient with my wife, who doesn’t deserve it. If I had a dog, I’d kick him. Or, with my luck, he’d bite me.

That’s the way it goes.

But I forced myself to get up and dressed. I had to. I had an appointment with my therapist at the VA, a block of time when I could go tell her – her name is Linda – how miserable I was, not so she could cure me but simply because I need someone to hear me moan and groan.

Before I headed for the hospital, I stopped by the fellowship meeting I go to each morning. The meeting hadn’t started, so I grabbed a cup of coffee and said hello to a couple of acquaintances. I lied when somebody I don’t really like about asked me how I was feeling. "Wonderful," I said. "Everything is just hunky-dory." I didn’t care if he heard what I muttered about him under my breath.

After I walked out, I sat in my car for a moment drinking my coffee. As I was sitting there, a white car I recognized pulled into the space next to me. It was a friend who just came down here from New York to spend a couple of weeks in his vacation home.

I was glad to see him. About six months ago, he was hospitalized with kidney failure. I’d been in touch, so I knew he’d recovered, but this was the first time he’d been in town since then.

Jim, that’s his name, is about as different from me as it’s possible to be. He’s big and I’m not. He’s serious and I’m not. He’s a conservative Republican and I’m a liberal Democrat. He was an army ranger in Vietnam while I was demonstrating against the war on the streets of Chicago. He was a command-level police officer in New York City while I was…well, you get the idea.

You’d think we wouldn’t get along, wouldn’t you? But we do. He and I have only known each other about three years, but when he’s here I see him almost every day and when he’s up north, we stay in e-mail contact. We’re comfortable in each other’s company.

There is, though, another area of disagreement. He’s a hard-core Roman Catholic and I’m a used-to-be Catholic. He goes to mass a couple of times a week. I drop into the Episcopal Church a couple of times a year.

Jim really believes in the power of prayer. I pray, but it’s more like an insurance policy for me. I’d hate to die and find out I was wrong.

Jim told me a long time ago that he would pray for me every day. When I heard he was sick, I started praying for him every evening. My prayer probably isn’t as formal as his, but I don’t think that much matters. I believe God doesn’t worry too much about formalities and if He did he’d probably be too busy to help Jim or me.

Anyway, when Jim saw me this morning he laughed. "I see we’re both still on this side of the grass," he said. "it looks like the prayers are working."

I guess that’s right. And that makes me happy. As soon as I saw him, I was able to smile. The day was suddenly made better.

Friendship is like that, isn’t it?