A STORY OF EARLY FRIENDSHIPS

Growing up in Chicago, my family early on was friends with the Sahlins – Bernie Sahlins, his wife, Fritzie and their daughter, Lee.  Bernie Sahlins became well-known for being, with his wife and others, a founder of “The Second City,” the improvisational theater troupe in Chicago that early on nurtured the talents of so many great comedians and actors, among them John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, and Tina Fey.

For me as a child what was most memorable was our families’ friendship and a trip we took to Bermuda together in the early 1950’s.  I considered the daughter, Lee, as my first “girlfriend.” So there was an aura of innocent romance, which at that age, of six years old, was simply a friendship between a boy and girl and there was the exotic atmosphere of being at leisure on a beautiful island in the middle of the ocean.  I remember her mom, Fritzie, from that time as being very animated and joyful.  Our rented house was surrounded by banana tress, fresh ocean air, and exotic colorful birds, making sounds we’d never heard.  We were a short walk to a wonder-filled beach with hundreds of giant rocks. My sister, Lisa, Lee and I leaped from rock to rock, alongside hundreds of little crabs scurrying about, with the ocean crashing beside us.  It was an idyllic trip for me and I think for everyone aboard.

However, we lost touch with the Sahlins when my family moved to the Chicago suburbs in 1960.  It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve thought a bit more about that family and about those days.

You can see from the photo I’m sharing below that there was quite a bit of exuberance then both for us kids and for our parents.  In this picture taken during that trip, my mother, Faye is in front, with me beneath her, my head on my hand, Lee standing beside us and Fritzie leaning into my mom with her head on her shoulder.

Just today I mined a bit more deeply on the internet and discovered that Lee (now “Lee Sherry”) had become a painter and lived in New York.  I’m not surprised - even as a child she seemed to have a certain depth to her.  I do wish I had dropped her a note now and then, as, with so many old friends, it’s sometimes too late. Lee passed away in 2012, Bernie in 2013 and Fritzie in 1991.

I treasure the memory of Lee and her family, and of mine, and those days that were, as far as I knew at the time, innocent and high-spirited.  I have inherited from them some of that allegiance to artistic exuberance, creativity, and imaginative activism. I send to the heavens above thanks for the times we had and the life which I am still able to enjoy in spite of various waters under various dams and bridges - political, social and personal - ever since.

There is a kind of magic implied by the phrase, “That’s all she wrote.” Whether I am thinking about long-time friends of thirty or forty years, or just one of three or four years duration from way in the distant past - when someone is gone, we are left with the memory of them still alive within us, still writing with its own individual script in our hearts – like initials we might have carved into living trees. 

Sometimes it is only that memory that stays alive, feeding our imagination, coloring and shaping our reality, the past contributing to the creation of the present, like a old painter making something new and gracing with beauty the current canvas of our life.