I spent a couple hours on the phone the other night with a man I haven't seen since high school. He in Northern California, I in New York City, two old men recalling

our youth in Minnesota. I love the telephone. It can be so intimate like radio which is the business I was in

for years. The voice carries so much humanity, even the silences speak.

He was the older brother of my high school friend Pete,

who had died a week before of stage four squamous carcinoma

that had spread through his body, making chemo and radiation pointless.

But his brother and I didn't talk much about death.

We let our memories drift back to high school.

His family was Catholic, mine was evangelical, he was the

handsomest boy in school and he dated my cousin Dolores briefly, remembered her and her beauty.

His mother was a friend of my mother-in-law, two smart women devoted to the arts and other good causes. He delivered the

evening paper and remembered his customers. He was a third string football player who didn't mind sitting on the bench.

His brother was a star halfback.

Both of them, to me then and still, epitomized smarts and the essence of cool, and in a little

farm town, they really stood out.

As I say, it was a mysterious conversation.

It went on and on threads of memory winding in and out.

And if we'd been sitting across the table from each other,

we'd have been keenly aware of our age.

His 83, mine almost 82, but our voices were ageless,

and the longer we taught, the more we remembered life on the Mississippi River

our sainted mothers our taciturn fathers. The brilliant classmate Leeds Cutter, killed by a drunk driver at the age

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