After listening to a cassette tape made for us by our friends Nick and Nancy way back in April of 1974.
Michael Estabrook
“Hi, is Dr. Van Loan there?”
“No, I’m sorry, he’s at the hospital. May I take a message?”
“Nancy? Is this you Nancy?”
“Yes.” Such hesitancy in her voice.
“Wow. Hi. This is Michael Wayne, how are you doing?”
“Michael? Oh, Mike! Oh my God, wow, I didn’t recognize your voice.”
“That’s OK, Nance, it’s been 18 years, you know.”
18 years. My goodness. Has it really been that long? The last time I saw Nick and Nancy was back in the fall of 1978. I was working for Cranfield Electronics at the time, selling particle counters and cell sizing instrumentation to universities and hospitals and industrial accounts. My territory included New York state. Every month or two I’d head north from New Jersey stopping first in Albany, then going west through Utica and Syracuse, into Rochester and Buffalo, finally swinging southeast through Elmira and Binghamton, then down into eastern Pennsylvania arriving at last back home.
On one of my swings through beautiful New York state, I stopped in and had dinner with Nick and Nancy. I stayed the night in their guest room. He was doing his residency at the Utica Hospital.
Nancy made a big spaghetti dinner, after which Nick and I drank some red wine, and took a long walk around the block. Cool winds blew the dead leaves of autumn all around us.
“You can do whatever you want to do Mike, whatever you like. This is America after all. Once you decide what you want, just do it. You have to do it. You only go around once, my friend.”
“But I have to make money, Nick. I have two kids now and a mortgage and college loans and car payments and all the rest of it. I can’t just go back to school full-time and become a writer.”
He claps my shoulder. “Yes you can! If you know what you want to do, you’re a fool not to pursue your dream. I mean look at me. Took me longer than most, but I wanted it, so I hung in there and slugged away until I got it. Now I’m a doctor.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. I’ll work on it.”
Last time I saw Nick was the following morning. It was 7 a.m. and he was going off to the hospital. He strode into the bathroom as I was standing there in my underwear shaving. He stuck out his hand, “Good to see you, Hog.” His nickname for me was Hognose, not something I particularly enjoyed.
“Stop in again when you’re up here. You’re always welcome here, you know that. Good friends are hard to come by. And get going on that writing career of yours.”
And that was that. I never made it back to see them in Utica, one thing led to another, we moved, they moved, we moved again, they moved again. Now suddenly, here it is 18 years later. My God, but it has gone fast.
I have thought about them often over the years, always with fond memories, always with a smile on my face. But it was the cassette tape I found that triggered my call to them. I was straightening up my library, going through a box of memorabilia: the front page of a newspaper from the summer of 1969 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon; my Grandfather’s business card - Fred Fischer, Handyman, General Repair Work, Renovating, Remodeling, Etc.; my Daddy’s dog tags and wallet; a cracked plaster camel Grammy bought for me at the Staten Island Zoo; a cassette tape from Nick and Nancy.
Patti and I would talk for an hour then mail the tape to them in Belgium. Then they’d talk for an hour and mail it back. This went on for a long time. I guess we ended up with the final tape, from April 1974, two years after we had left Belgium.
“So how are you Mike? How’s Patti?
“Oh we’re fine. And you? You and Nick are still together, I guess.”
“Why yes, and how about you and Patti?”
“Yes, still together, 26 years now.”
“With so many divorces it’s amazing that we’re all still together. Did you know the Warners? No I guess not, you had left Belgium by the time they were there. Well, they’re divorced, and the Feinbergs, you didn’t know them either I don’t think, but anyway, they . . .”
I recall June of 1971, when I got it into my head to become a doctor. I was working at The Roosevelt Hospital in New York City at the time. A doctor there who had graduated from medical school in Belgium convinced me I could do it, that it was a great thing to do. This was my chance to break free from my poor background and mediocre beginnings, to make something important of myself. So off we went, Pat and I, just like that. Put all our stuff in my in-laws’ garage, gave my boa constrictor to the local pet shop, sold my ‘66 bahama blue Volkswagen beetle to my brother, Kerry, and off we went.
Nick and Nancy became our good friends for the two years we were over there. We saw each other a lot, in class mostly, but we studied together too, shopped and ate together, hung around together with other Americans.
But then I left the medical program, essentially because I decided I couldn’t stand the thought of becoming a doctor, of having to memorize all that crap about drug doses and symptoms, disease states and therapy protocols, all the muscles, nerves, bones, arteries, veins, blah blah blah. I simply couldn’t do that to myself, to my mind. At least that’s how I rationalized it at the time. “I don’t want to ruin my mind by becoming so completely immersed in sickness and death. I’m a Renaissance man. I need to know and do many things, I need variety of thought and life experiences.” Oh brother.
But the truth of the matter is, I’m from Northfield Avenue, a staid, stale, pathetic little suburb of middle-class America overflowing with factory workers, postman, garage mechanics, shop clerks, and frumpy housewives in pink curlers and aprons. In medical school I was in way over my head. And particularly, going to class and studying medicine in Flemish was a bit beyond the range of the potential engendered by my genetic endowment and the environment I was raised in. I had trouble expressing myself in English, let alone Flemish, for Christ’s sake.
So I quit. One night I cracked, took all my notes and books and tore them up, threw them all around in our stupid unheated apartment out in front of the Stella Artois Beer Plant and Distribution Center. “Pat, we’re going home. I’ve had it.” She didn’t argue with me. She had had enough too. Both of us hated living in Belgium. God, it was hard.
But my friend Nick stuck it out, even after failing and having to repeat his first year, he stuck it out. He passed his tests and is now a medical doctor, specializing in family practice.
“How did you find us?” Nancy asked.
“That’s a funny story actually, well not that funny. I found you on the Internet.”
“The Internet? We’re on the Internet?”
“The AMA has a listing of all the doctors in the country up there, all 700,000 of them.”
“Oh yes, of course.” Nancy liked to think she knew just about everything. But she’s a big-hearted person. “But how did you know we were here? I mean, you last saw us when we lived in Utica.”
“I knew you guys would end up in New Hampshire. You loved it so, always talking about the mountains and all. So I went to the Internet listing of doctors in New Hampshire, found you in Contoocook, then called information. I thought this was Nick’s office number, that’s why I was so surprised when you answered.”
She then filled me in on their family. They have a 16 year old son I didn’t even know about. “He’s training for the Olympics in winter sports.” And Annette is a senior at Keene State.
“I keep my hand in nursing part-time. And Nick is an emergency room doctor down in Nashua. He works 15 days a month, one week on, one week off. He gave up his private practice four years ago.”
But I didn’t ask about it. From the tone of her voice it didn’t sound like such a good thing to have happened. Perhaps there aren’t enough people in their little town to support an old country doctor. Perhaps he’s a bad businessman, taking care of his patients for free. I can see him doing that.
“Can you come up here and visit us? Some Saturday or something?”
“Sure, Nance, that sounds great. You’re only an hour and a half away. We can come up easily and visit for a day.”
“Wonderful, I’ll check Nick’s schedule, he has such a crazy schedule you know, then we’ll call you back. I’m excited for you two to come up and visit, can’t wait to see you again. We’ll call you. Say hello to Patti for me. Bye.”
But it’s been over a month now since I called Nancy, and left our address and phone number. It looks as if Nick isn’t going to be calling me back. The first week he didn’t call I figured, oh he’s working those 12 hour days at the hospital. He’s exhausted. The second week I said pretty much the same thing. As the third week came and went with no word from my old friend, I was surprised. But now, after a month, well, all I can say is, I’m flabbergasted, really I am.
I wondered if I had done something to offend, way back when. But I can think of nothing.
“Maybe he’s in a bad place in his life,” Pat suggests. “Maybe he hates being a doctor, or his practice failed and he’s an alcoholic or something. I mean you don’t know what’s going on. It’s been 18 years, they may not be the same people anymore.”
“But Nancy sounded so normal, just like the old days.”
She shrugs. “You don’t know.”
Or perhaps Nick is a doctor and simply has no use for me. I hate to think about it that way, but I’m not a doctor. I dropped out of medical school. I’m a salesman. I’m a failure.
And too, if I’m honest about it, I wasn’t the greatest friend Nick ever had. Us getting to know each other under the circumstances of attending medical school in Leuven, Belgium, was strange to say the least. I literally studied all the time, 14, 15 hours a day. I did nothing else. I was virtually a shut-in. In two years we spent maybe two weeks, cumulatively, sightseeing.
But Nick, well he was too excited about being in Europe to buckle down and study. He couldn’t help himself. He was there to have a good time, to “experience Europe.” He’s from a wealthy family, after all, so he bought himself a new BMW with a state-of-the-art stereo, and drove the autobahns in Germany. He had a cousin who lived in Amsterdam, so they were always visiting him, and touring and sightseeing, doing fancy dinners. Then there was the karate class he took, and the weight room at the gymnasium, and skiing, my God how he loved to ski in the Alps, and the beer, all the different beers from all the different countries.
So our relationship was in a sense strained. Me, a poor student struggling to understand bits of Flemish in the classroom and on the streets, never quite getting the hang of it, never immersing myself enough in the Belgian “culture.” And Nick, tall, good-looking, wealthy, bold and brash, gadflying around Europe, buying this, visiting that, the world was his clam, and he was fluent in Flemish to boot.
But we had something special, Nick and I did, an invisible bond. We were two among a handful of Americans struggling to succeed in a seven year medical school program in a foreign place. We went through some tough times together, times of uncertainty and alienation.
We both had a romantic conception about the meaning of friendship. You make only a few true friends in your lifetime, but the ones you make are your friends forever. We felt the same about that. If we went 30 years without seeing one another, it wouldn’t matter, we would still be friends. When we got together it would be like old times. We both felt this. We both even voiced this to each other. Even though I couldn’t afford to buy a BMW or ski in the Alps, couldn’t spare the time away from my studies to lift weights and take karate classes, or visit England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Germany, Italy and France, we had something special. We studied medicine together. We complained about the Belgians together. We went through those early tenuous, doubtful days in a foreign place together. We missed home together.
After Pat and I returned to the States, we wrote letters and sent our cassette tape back and forth, staying as close to each other as we could. When they returned home we saw them a few times. They visited us in New Jersey and New York. We visited them when he was doing his internship in Connecticut. And then, of course, I saw them in Utica. But finally, I suppose, time and distance, and him being a doctor and me not, drove in the wedge until the log was split. So here we are. I feel like an idiot. I feel like crying. I should have known better.
No, Nick isn’t going to call me back. I can’t believe it. Maybe Nancy forgot I called, or lost the paper with our number on it. She’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. Maybe I should call again, or send a letter. No, maybe I shouldn’t. If he wanted to speak with me or see us, he’d call back. But no, my old true friend Nick isn’t going to be calling me back. I can’t believe it. What a jerk I am. The naivete, the audacity of calling someone up after 18 long years of silence, and expecting them to give a shit.
Seems I’m learning things about friendship I never knew before, things I’d rather not know. But there it is. There it all is.
