Larry and i were tight in the early 60’s, did a lotta neat things together. Along with things like, basketball, cars, drinking beer over in NY State... we were both addicted to shooting pool [don’t play much anymore] one night in big snowstorm hit just after he and i hitchhiked to Pittsfield from Adams, trying to make a few bucks playing 9-ball probably. When we came out of the poolhall a few hours later the place was dead quiet, a foot on the ground, more fallin fast. So hitchin back home was useless, we started walkin. Got a ride part way from a plow, walked a lot more got a ride from a cop for one section, it musta been 1963. It was a seminal night in my life, i remember it as clear as if it were last week, we talked, in those quiet long hours of walking, about everything, about the future, i can still feel the snow in my face.
In the next few years our lives went in different directions, mine to college, his to a one way ticket to Vietnam. Larry didn't believe in the Vietnam bullshit, heard him say so, but he felt he had to go because his dad was a WWII vet and it was his duty. His life/death had a big influence on how mine evolved. Time ain’t done shit to heal the wound i felt when i heard Larry had died, being just a kid then myself, it’s taken a long time to realize just how much Larry meant to me and how deep a wound gets left by each ridiculous, unnecessary death in every war on all sides.
War serves the rich, makes them richer, millions of others pay. War and politics perside only in the realm of the control of property and money and are the opposite of freedom which is an internal condition that can’t be granted or controlled but rather evolves out of attitude. Our problems are philosophical, until they’re solved the political ones, and the wars they spawn, will keep reappearing over and over.
Larry, a long lost friend...
