ELIOT, ’SCHLEY AND MONTE

Eliot knew ’Schley and Monte peripherally at the very least and of that there is no question. A six-year age difference is a much bigger deal when you’re a kid than later on. After all, 18-year-olds and twelve-year-olds don’t have a lot in common.

Also indisputable is that now on their respective best days, the three might be hard-pressed to recognize one another immediately with any degree of certainty.

Let’s just say these aren’t their best days.

When we were growing up, Eliot was one of my older brother’s best friends and ’Schley became one of mine.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient Monte, the silent assassin, a top student-athlete and a true force to be reckoned with. My best friend from kindergarten right up to our freshman year in high school and beyond, less a day-to-day thing but absolutely no less unconditionally. A close friend of ’Schley’s too.

Best friends and arch nemeses — with more than a dollop of love, kindness, mutual respect and a drop or two of blood spilling about for good measure. It was the same with ’Schley and me.

In those days you competed but not in programmed Belichickian language. It was more organic at that time. We played sports. All sports. You tried your ass off at whatever it was. You snorted, grunted and expectorated — not indoors if it could be helped — and you did the best you could. In sports and in school.

Ask Belichick. We’re from the same era. He knows how it was and he remembers how it was, believe me.

You punched someone in the nose and you were punched in the nose. Period. You moved on. No political correctness. No parental intervention or helicoptering, speaking of sticking an unwanted and unneeded nose in there. Nothing. None of that. Not then.

Life was much simpler back in the fifties and sixties. There was innocence. A purity of sorts.

Sure there was debauchery and rule-bending but somehow things in general were more wholesome or so it seems, especially in retrospect.

What you saw was what you got, pretty much. Ours was a more straightforward time, an existence with far fewer distractions and much less potential for real danger. Of course there was crime but guns and the havoc they wreaked represented something of a rarity back in the day, bearing little if any resemblance to what goes on now.

Mainstream drug use was there. High-tech then was the space shuttle; it was largely a low-tech environment, at least for us. Surely for me. And that was fine. Because we had nothing to compare it to, save for what danced around in our imaginations.

Thank God for our imaginations and the flow of our creative juices which span the test of time.

Time. Traveling through space and time.

This time thing is very peculiar. Each second and minute weigh the same, count for the same and always have. Yet when you’re young and anticipation is seismic things always seem to take forever. Waiting for the end of a school day. Lunchtime block. Recess. Your next birthday. Being old enough to drive.

And when you’re old (or older) time flies by so meteorically — faster than the speed of sound — it makes your head spin. Weeks and months pass in a heartbeat. Years. Life. Your life.

We lose our wide-eyed personae and become more seasoned, mottled, jaded, cynical and then grizzled. Occasionally our happiness wanes thoughtlessly, callously and sometimes almost inevitably shunted aside. Replaced by whatever our existing view of reality is at that time. We are no longer surprised so easily.

And I’m here to tell you, it does not have to be like this; this way. If we were all just a little more closely attuned to what is around us — what surrounds us — and moved outside of ourselves, the clarity of this notion would be blinding, spell-binding and worth its weight in gold. Its power could take your eyes out and knock off your socks, I swear. Awe-inspiring is what it would be; pardon the proselytizing.

And why should it take something as poignant or painfully heartbreaking as tragedy to uncannily — and without fail — sharpen our focus? This is the old and tired “$64,000 Question” (worth $576,554.03 today incidentally).

It is sad but true that we don’t know what we have until we lose it. Health, family, relationships even money. Muddling along with our daily travails as a constant companion we lose sight of what’s truly important and spiral downward into that black vortex known as taking much too much (everything?) for granted.

We forget how to appreciate and how to be grateful. Whatever we have are gifts to which we pay far too little attention and not enough respect…until something is taken away. And by then, it may often be too late.

Eliot, ’Schley and yes, the aforementioned Monte (albeit on different levels and scales) have all lost their good health in rather dramatic fashion. They are men in their mid-sixties and 70, considered middle-aged but in 2020 still young enough. Their life expectancies project to about 85 using whatever metrics are involved in determining the basic ‘on-average’ calculation today.

It may be open to question to others as to whether or not Eliot or ‘Schley would care to continue to live as they presently do for another 20 years. (Monte most probably would).

But interestingly, their declining health combined with the vagaries of the natural ageing process have worked in concert, humbling these men to the point that they are grateful for what they have. For what they have left. They are happy to be alive.

I know this because I know them. They are fighters. They are tough. They are smart. They get it. And they don’t give up.

My fervent hope and great desire is that the three of them appreciated what was gifted them from day one and not after the fact, after they fell ill.

Because it shouldn’t take a tragedy or a loss to see whatever it is that you had…or have. And of course, to be thankful for it.