Having Each Of You As Friends (rev)

For more than 40 years we’ve been good friends,
since 1963 in fact, from college where we met (and
managed there to build a strong quartet of campus
friendship – which kept those years intact still yet
as clear as yesterday).

We were The Musketeers, four sons of Nereid, or
perhaps Persephone, as different each from each
as one could be, shared a camaraderie unique and
of the time, fasted in the line to learn the dreaded
pedagogic trade.

We graduated well in ‘64 and left that year to infill
spaces our seniors vacated in a vastly stolid World
beyond the barrack walls of trainees’ sphere, young
and unafraid, packed with zeal and energy, imbued
with the unflagging acuity of a probationary year.

Our meetings in those days were great events of
poignant merriment and risqué cheer, exploits
which shred the bounds of better judgment (as
decided by our management) and often while we
fell afoul we always brushed up well.

I recall the ‘Grande Affaires’ of early musketeers,
Aramis, Porthos, Athos and eclectic Monsieur
D’Artagnon, but never knew who was who. I thought
I’d be D’Artagnon, introspective, droll, or Porthos
muscled with a fork and dark intent

singularly bent on righting wrongs, but the talk
was wasted in a whirl of traded places, perhaps we
traded faces in that candid space. I relive it now
and then, would live it all again in hope
of having each of you as friends.
© 1 September 2006, I.D. Carswell
For Scotty, Seal & Gerry