This is the third one of these I’ve written this year—remembrances of people who were important to me and are no longer with us. It is, I suppose, a function of getting old and having friends for a long time.

There are similarities in all three: they lived a long time, they accomplished things, and they had family and friends that they loved and who loved them. That is probably a good definition of a successful life. There was a fourth similarity, too. All of them were experiencing such a decline in their quality of life that if they had been allowed to vote on whether to go or stay, I have no doubt that each of them would have voted to go.

The last of these was the oldest friend I had on the planet. Joe Britt and I went back to the fall of 1958 when we met standing in a long line at the college bookstore at Western Carolina College. It was a slow-moving line, and this was before everyone had phones that they could stare at. We struck up a conversation, and once we got our stack of books, we went to the coffee shop to continue it. We became instant good friends, sharing opinions, a college major, several classes and a strange sense of humor.

By the time I met Joe, he already had holes in his soul from disappointments; he was a far more experienced human being that I. Yet, he was good company, and the following quarter we moved into an apartment together, An upstairs flat where the floors didn’t meet the walls, and the coal stove ensured that part of the apartment was much too hot and the rest too cold. We signed up for a lot of the same classes and admired and criticized the same professors.

We were beatniks. Because Joe had been to California and actually spent time with real beatniks, he was much more authentic than I. However, I read a lot of strange things and put up a good front.

Once I had to write a profile of someone for my writing class, and I chose Joe as my  profile subject. It’s been a long time since I wrote those four pages, but I remember two things about it. The first was that  that he often watched silently as things went on around him, smiling what I called his Jesus smile, a small, very calm and gentle smile that seemed to say, I know more than you do.

The second thing I remember was that he showed up for Josefina’s class the day I read the profile and sat in the back, adopting his usual posture, his arms and legs wound pretzel-like about each other. Smiling his Jesus smile. He never said whether he liked or agreed with the profile or not.

Joe did well in school, making decent grades, getting the male lead in The Little Foxes, and writing much better poetry than I did. Then, a lot of things changed. I dropped out to try to get my head straight, going back to Benson to work. Joe left school for reasons of his own. When I came back to school the following fall, I was married, and Joe was not enrolled. We lost touch. I missed him, but as a husband and soon-to-be father, I had a lot on my plate. I got my degree, found a job, and got on with my life.

We lost touch for about thirty years. I thought of him frequently, wondering what his life was like. I had a couple of things that we had bought jointly; when we had to give up our apartment because some other students had had a wild party in their apartment (to which we weren’t invited), I got custody of the big French dictionary and a couple of other books. They’re still on my bookshelves.

I decided that our friendship had ended much too abruptly and decided to find him. Since Joe wasn’t a joiner, the alumni association wasn’t any help. However, the internet, as young and rudimentary as it was, did help. I located him and his phone number on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. I called him, and we chatted as if there hadn’t been a thirty-year intermission.

It’s seems strange that life looks so different looking backward than it did looking forward. Joe was an accomplished writer, a very decent actor, and a voracious reader. I assumed that he’d landed in a literary or dramatic space. He did, in fact, spend some time doing technical work in regional theatre, but he spent most of his life married to Barbara and dealing in real estate on the Outer Banks with a good deal of success. They had a son, Jon, who started a family of his own.

Joe had, by pretty much any definition, been successful. Husband. Father. Businessman.

We never got together again. Neither of us traveled much. But we did talk frequently, sharing admiration and disdain for politicians just as we had for professors. We bragged about our families, wondered about people we remembered from years ago and had lost track of. And calling up the times we had been the closest of friends.

A couple of weeks ago, Joe called me. He said that he was in an assisted living home, that the food wasn’t very good, but there was plenty of it, and he was glad not to be so much of a burden on his son and the son’s family. He was very grateful for what they had done for him for years. We spent time laughing at remembrances of George Herring, a professor and friend who set a high bar for the definition of eccentricity. And we expressed some admiration for each other: my admiration for what he had been able to accomplish and his for my continuing to be active in my dotage. We both thought that, on balance, we had done pretty well.

His son called me yesterday to tell me that Joe had passed away. There were tears in Jon’s voice as we talked. He’ll miss his father, no matter how much he had declined. It’ll be a hole in his life, as it will be in mine. But when we hung up, I didn’t think so much about our last conversations as I did the night we stayed up outlining a play that a couple of music students had asked us to write. (I would have said “commissioned” if there had been money involved.) They had given us a list of songs that they wanted to sing and asked us to come up with a plot for some sort of operetta or musical. The fact that we’d probably have violated 25 or 30 copyrights didn’t really occur to us. By dawn we had an outline that included characters, a kind of a plot, and all of the songs. We submitted it to the music students. They may still be arguing about it.

I can imagine Joe watching, still smiling his Jesus smile.