Can't You Do a Friend a Favor?

"It is not so easy to be a friend, is it Reuven?"  So says David Malter to his son, Reuven, in The Chosen by Chaim Potok.  I agree.  To be the right kind of friend at the right time is a challenge and a test of who we are as individuals.  It is easy to be the kind of friend we want to be, but can we be the kind of friend another needs us to be?

I have/had/have a good friend of many years who recently asked me to let him go, to let him shut the door on five years of family dinners, birthday parties, game nights, rehearsals, concerts, plays, camping trips, and generic hanging out.  To compound the matter, he was more than just a friend, he was a collaborative partner.  We met in a theater.  We were in many shows and were writing a musical together.  This, too, has ended.  He gave me permission to remove his name from the title page.  Per his request, I now write alone.

I am reminded of the great musical theater team of Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart.  They collaborated on over 500 songs, including some of the greatest standards of all time, such as "My Funny Valentine" and "Blue Moon."  When a 17 year old Rogers met the older Larry Hart for the first time he said, "I left Hart's house having acquired in one afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation."  I echo that sentiment.  Yet this legendary friendship and partnership also came to an end.  Hart was an alcoholic and was soon uncontrollable, drinking and partying late into the night, inevitably hungover when it was time to work.  Rogers had to find a new partner for his next musical and successfully teamed with Oscar Hammerstein II.  Meanwhile Hart, after a late night drunken binge that left him exposed to the cold and the elements, died of pneumonia at the age of 48.

The demise of my collaboration is not nearly so colorful.  No drinking, drugs, or parties are involved.  Instead there is a much more potent force, a new "friend," a fiancée, to be exact, who apparently can't abide the old friendship.  And so the choice is before me.  Do I really let him go?  How badly I want to send him a birthday card, a wedding present, an email with a funny picture I know he would enjoy.  I know where he lives, where he works, his new cell number, his parents address, all his email addresses.  Why can't I just keep in touch a little, from a distance?  There's an old Rogers and Hart song, "Can't you do a friend a favor?" with the following lyric:

You can count your friends

On the fingers of your hand.

If you're lucky, you have two.

I have just two friends,

Only two, just me and you.

That is all I demand,

And a good friend heeds a friend

When a good friend needs a friend.

I will heed.  I will end this friendship, collaboration, partnership.  I will let him walk away.  I have deleted his number from my phone, erased his texts, put away his photos, and, hardest of all, scratched his name off the title page of the musical with a black Sharpie.

Precisely because he is my friend.

Lorenz Hart

Richard Rogers