In our minds, we Usual Suspects are still the four young couples that we were in the mid-1960s when our friendships formed in St. Petersburg, Fla. Photos from the ‘60s, from our first reunion in 1994, and the most recent one last year, however, would reveal the irresistible tug of time and gravity.
It has been a long journey
Just getting accustomed to being adults and too poor to be pretentious, we were friends simply because we liked each other. We are friends now because we still like each other.
We could have missed knowing that, though, except for a lunchtime conversation.
Jean and Charlie had remained in St. Petersburg, and Tom and Shirley lived in Clearwater. The two couples did not see each other often, but Jean and Tom both worked in downtown St. Petersburg and often lunched in the same place.
By then Chuck and Leanne and Adelaide and I had long been gone from St Petersburg. They were settled in Claremont, Calif., and we lived in Montgomery, Ala.
One day at lunch, Jean suggested that the four couples have a reunion at the house Tom and Shirley had built in the mountains of Colorado in anticipation of retirement.
I think curiosity impelled all of us to attend that first reunion, and we approached it with questions and a certain amount of trepidation. Within minutes of the last couple’s arrival, the intervening years were swept away, and the Usual Suspects were born.
We agreed that meeting every other year would keep the reunions from becoming a duty, and the schedule gave us something to look forward to. The primary site specification was that there be room for all of us to hang out.
If you listened to a sound track of our gatherings, you would understand why. You would hear laughter, punctuated by barbs that would make you wonder how the verbal combatants could possibly be friends. We are armed with sharp tongues, but we never draw blood.
Each time a Roundup of the Usual Suspects ends, we know that our numbers might be diminished before the next gathering. Mortality is a reality, and as the years pass, the horizon comes closer.
Still, in the summer of 2008 when our reunion on the Oregon coast broke up, none of us expected that the first person missing would be Charlie.
Charlie was full of life, passionate and curious and energetic. He loved corny jokes and bad puns, and he would tell them with relish, knowing that his reward would be a chorus of groans.
He loved his native St. Petersburg and the starkly beautiful Four Corners of the Southwest and the brooding mountains of Tennessee. And because he loved them, he acquired a depth of knowledge about the flora and the fauna and the people of each region.
He loved visiting rock shops, and he polished stones to decorate the exquisite wooden boxes that he crafted.
He and Jean were the perfect pair. And he was positively gaga about his grandchildren.
In all the years, we had never known Charlie to be ill with anything.
But not long after he and Jean returned home from the reunion, Charlie was diagnosed with lymphoma. Chemotherapy drove it away, and last spring Jean and Charlie and Adelaide and I spent a week in his beloved mountains celebrating his remission from lymphoma and my recovery from bypass surgery.
The lymphoma had retreated, but it had not surrendered, and it returned last summer more virulent than before.
Charlie died just before Christmas.
So early in January six of the Usual Suspects will go to St Petersburg. We will join Jean at a memorial service for her husband and our friend.
Adelaide and I will share our son’s observation upon learning of Charlie’s death: “To make a difference and to be well remembered is something everyone aspires to.”
Certainly Charlie achieved that and much more.
But knowing that does not ease the sting of his departure.
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
