My Friend Judy
Judy died almost three years before I learned of her death. We had been close for only two years at the beginning of the decade of the 1970s, the end of the years of great changes. But now, in a completely atomized society, I value that relationship even more than I did in that time long ago. People who read my writing say that it’s best when I’m humorous, but there are only fleeting glimpses of humor in this story, probably the most humorous at a restaurant north of Albany, New York, on the thruway. I’ll get to that later, so hang on for a short time.
Judy was my best friend Joe’s love for a time, and Joe has also been gone from my life for decades. Sometimes, in fact, most of the time, these losses are very real and painful. Joe and I went to the same school in Rhode Island as undergraduates and were part of the campus peace group.
I met Judy on the phone in the spring of 1970. I had just returned from advanced training in the army and had returned to my job. I knew that Joe had gone to New Haven, Connecticut, to take part in protests there involving the Black Panthers. The protests there grew, and the government sent troops to Quonset Point Naval Air Station, to be used in case the demonstration got seriously larger and more demonstrative.
I sat at my study desk in my bedroom listening to the roar of the military transport planes flying low over the roof of my family’s home. The planes carried troops and their equipment. I was alarmed at how many planes flew over and called Judy at her and Joe’s apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Judy was a student at NYU, and Joe was in a graduate program there. I would follow both Judy and Joe to NYU the following academic year.
Judy, Joe, and I spent lots of time together over the next year and a half. We sometimes ate at Hungry Charley’s just off of Washington Square Park in the Village. We also got into conversations late into the night at Café Borgia at the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker Streets in the heart of the West Village. Joe had lots of money, but neither did Judy and I, although we drank lots of cappuccinos and ate many cannolis. Café Borgia’s cannolis were the best, or at least that’s how memory has it. Joe and I spent endless hours in front of the television at a residence hall at NYU on the first floor making rollicking fun of whatever TV show aired at the time.
During the early part of the summer of 1971, Joe, Judy, and I planned to visit a friend of my family’s who had recently moved to Canada, to the north and west of Ottawa, and was building a house there. I had no idea that the trip would be the beginning of the end of my relationship with both Judy and Joe. I would later learn that something had happened on the trip between Joe and the woman I was dating, but never the details, and only the negative feelings that came from Joe’s behavior.
When Judy and I began an online connection, decades later, it seemed as if I was communicating with a different person than the person I had known all of those years ago. I sent her the article I published about our road trip, and she seemed bothered by something I wrote in the piece. She said that she had been so high on drugs during that time (that did not seem like an accurate recollection) that she thought we were traveling to Cape Cod and not to Canada. There were so many notable happenings during that four or five-day trip, which we took in a ’67 green Ford Mustang. A person would have had to have been on a different planet not to have remembered those events.
On New York’s Northway, Route 87, somewhere north of Albany, we stopped at a small town and ate dinner. While we sat in a booth past the counter section of the restaurant, one person started taunting Joe and me about the length of our hair, which was long. Joe was outspoken and countered the insults. According to Judy, the interaction got so nasty that someone in the restaurant called the police, and we were escorted out of town to the entrance ramp for the highway. Judy came from Queens, and she would have known, almost instinctively, that we were not headed east toward the Cape, but rather, headed north on the highway.
On one morning during our trip, we all walked the hundred yards or so down to the river that bordered Donny’s neighbor’s property and brushed our teeth while standing there. Donny’s neighbor came out onto his land, his arms flailing. When he got close enough, we could hear him shouting that sewerage was dumped into the river upstream and that we needed to get out of the water. Needless to say, much spitting took place on our part following that neighborly revelation.
A day or so after the Fourth of July, we were just south of the Canadian border on the Northway again. My friend and I were broke. We had used a credit card to put gasoline into the Mustang for the trip, so we didn’t follow Judy and Joe into the highway rest stop. They came out with triple-scoop strawberry ice cream cones, and our hunger must have been at least marginally obvious, but despite our contribution to the trip, besides staying for free on Donny’s land, we had asked for nothing and were obviously going to get nothing in return. We must have seemed like Pavlov’s dogs looking longingly at the ice cream cones.
A month or so ago, I thought about our trip and recalled the motel we had stayed in when we crossed the Canadian border from the US. We all woke up soaked sometime during the night and had to retrieve sleeping bags from the Mustang in order to sleep with even a modicum of dry comfort. When we got up the next morning, the reason for our discomfort was obvious, as the motel property bordered the Saint Lawrence River, a natural and copious source of humidity and moisture. I wanted to know the area where we crossed into Canada and for some reason I thought about Judy and wondered how she was doing in the years since we last communicated online. The shock was palpable!
When I learned of Judy’s death, I finally decided to write to one of Judy’s daughters, and she wrote back to me. What impressed me most about Judy’s obituary was how far she had moved from how I knew her so very long ago. Judy was in a graduate program when I last saw her on the morning of the last day of our trip. Without judgement, I was amazed to learn how and where she had lived her life, her major life achievements and how different they were from the person I once knew. Again, without judgement, Judy had moved from being involved in movements for change onto a path of careerism that was common among so many from the youth movement of the days when we first met. The writing about Judy’s life mentioned her time in New York City as a student and that part of her life that seemed light years away. The time and political and social environment in which we met also seemed light years away.
I still grieve for my old friend. I see us at our best on the road in what was called a decade or so full of dreams and high ideals. I mourn what has been lost and can connect to what was best and young and new about ourselves and the world in which we lived.
I remember one morning in particular, May 1, 1971, when a group of students had traveled by bus to Washington, DC, to take part in protests against the Vietnam War. We had arrived in DC late the night before and had unrolled our sleeping bags in West Potomac Park near the Lincoln Memorial. Judy, Joe, and I got up, as the police demanded we leave the park. They eventually, after a short time, chased us out. Judy was heading off to a feminist march against the war, and Joe and I were on our own. It’s that particular morning, and that particular time, in which I will remember Judy best.
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