Between 1976 – when I ran away to New York City – and 1980, there are memories that live always just beneath the surface of my skin. All it took to send me back to that golden period was the wide grin on Marc Shaiman's face when he walked into the lobby of my station's headquarters. I hadn't seen him in over forty years, yet the moment I did, a whole world came rushing back: Zora Rasmussen, Reno Sweeney, Scott Whitman, Michael Musto, After Dark Magazine, Tommy Tune, Bette Midler, Milk n Cookies, Justin Strauss, Sal Maida, Tony Zanetta, Peter Crowley, Cherry Vanilla. Marc Shaiman was at Arizona Public Media's Baker Center to tape a vodcast interview for our "Speaking Personally" series. Before we got to any of that, we took a selfie and sent it to Zora. How great!!!!!, she wrote back instantly, and the three of us were, briefly, young again.
That night I fell down a rabbit hole of memories – some difficult, some joyous – and I thought about what it means that a single smile across a lobby could do that. Could collapse forty years in an instant. Could make a person feel, just for a moment, wholly known.
Not every friendship offers that gift. Some hold; others falter once time begins to thin the threads between us. Someone I once called a brother, a man woven into the fabric of my life for more than forty years, quietly vanished – no fight, no farewell, just an unfriending on Facebook, that peculiarly modern gesture of erasure. By contrast, another friend I've known almost as long still writes to me from a small town in southwest England. Deborah Owen's messages arrive like postcards tossed across the Atlantic – small, luminous fragments of her days and memories of the year we met in London.
My longest-running friend, Jamie Smith, I met when we were both secretaries to high-profile documentary producers at CBS Reports; we forged something that has outlasted every job title either of us has ever held.
And then there's my old roommate from Los Angeles, who once promised dinner the moment I returned to California. Can't wait to see you, he wrote. For a while, I believed it. Then -- silence, as sudden and complete as a curtain falling.
I try not to be sentimental about these disappearances, but they unsettle me. There are the friendships tethered to work, evaporating when the shared purpose ends. The cocktail-party acquaintances that sprout in laughter and good intentions -- Let's get together soon -- only to dissolve into the slow drip of unreturned messages and polite evasions.
It's the quietness of it all that lingers. Most friendships don't burn out; they blur. A missed call, a delayed reply, a birthday forgotten -- and then absence, unannounced but somehow complete. Sometimes I read through old emails, startled by the warmth that once flowed so easily. I wonder if I changed, or they did. Or if this is simply how life moves: people drifting out of each other's gravitational pull.
With age, friendship begins to feel less like a possession and more like weather -- unpredictable, shifting, something you learn to admire while it's here but cannot hold. Those who remain -- the precious few who still reach across oceans or time zones to say how are you, really? -- become something rare and steady. These gestures matter more now. Not in their frequency, but in their persistence: the simple proof that connection can survive distance, silence, and the long pauses of life.
Perhaps this quiet recession of old friends is a rehearsal for loss itself. A softening toward impermanence. We start to understand that nothing -- not love, not company, not even the self we once were -- lasts in the form we expect. Yet memory continues to light the dark, and gratitude reshapes the ache into something gentler.
In the end, I no longer measure friendship by its length but by its resonance. Some flare brightly and vanish; others endure as low embers that keep a faint warmth alive. Marc Shaiman's grin reminded me of that – how a single moment of recognition, after all those years, can feel like proof that some connections simply don't break. I think often of those small fires still burning in distant rooms, unseen perhaps, but felt. And that, I have come to believe, is enough.
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