№ 666. Friendships 2

Preview

 

From the Friendship Files: Milton and Mike

Every Saturday morning for decades, Milton Ehrlich and his best friend, Mike, scoured garage sales near their homes in New Jersey, searching for books, records and antique bottles. But when Mike was in his 70s, he started losing his memory. Once, he wandered off from a garage sale and got lost. The police had to find him.

 

Determined not to lose their weekly date, Milton, who is now 91, began to call his friend every Saturday instead, playing for him their favorite music from the 1940s, including Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughn. “Even though, by that time, Mike was having a hard time remembering what happened yesterday, the music always transported him,” Milton said. “He could sing along with lyrics and remember melodies from music that was 75 years old.”

The calls buoyed them both. When Milton’s wife passed away in 2021, after 67 years of “happy marriage,” the weekly ritual with Mike “became one of the last close personal connections in my life,” he said. His brothers died long ago, as did most of his friends. Milton and Mike exchanged only a few words between songs. For the most part, they just listened.

“It was a way of remaining tethered to my old buddy,” Milton said. “We would sit there, our houses about a mile apart in a small suburban town, each of us in our rocking chairs, staying connected to each other through the music of our teenage years.”

Mike died in October and, with him, a library of stories — about the best places to eat in Little Italy, about the clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow and the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and about the things you could buy for a nickel at Coney Island, Milton said. He was 90 years old. — Catherine Pearson

№ 665. Friendships

12 Ideas to Boost Your Happiness

 

Amy Pechukas met her friend Al in 2018 when she rented the apartment under his in Northampton, Mass. They didn’t connect immediately. Amy, now 42, worked four jobs and thought Al, 76, was a curmudgeon with questionable boundaries. He helped look after their two-family home and would frequently enter her apartment to check on her two cats and two dogs.

But Al’s peculiar brand of kindness grew on her. “He often pops in for a conversation spontaneously, at times when I need a lift, and we end up talking for hours,” she said. “We go for evening walks and argue about the route.”

Covid brought them even closer. During lockdown, they would meet in the driveway to talk about the virus or politics. Amy made a Thanksgiving meal, which they ate outside on their porch with electric blankets on their laps. They have celebrated the holiday together ever since.

Al can still be overbearing. He has firm ideas about the way things should be done around the home, like the “right” way to rake the leaves. Every summer, he frets that Amy’s elderly cat, who grows lazy in the heat, is on the verge of death.

But Amy feels deep gratitude for their unexpected friendship, and for the constant, unselfish care Al has shown her and her pets. “When my dog got very sick a year ago and needed me to do round-the-clock care for her, I would come home on occasion to find Al in my kitchen doing my dishes,” she recalled. “‘You can’t do everything, Amy,’ he’d say. ‘You’re doing a great job.’”

Though Al does not say it outright, Amy knows he worries she might move out. She recently interviewed for a position out of state, and Al told her several times that it sounded terrible — reminding her that there were other jobs closer by.

“We just have a lot of fun,” she said. “We like to quote movie lines endlessly, we’ll do that for, like, two hours straight. Last winter we went ice skating in the cemetery because it was flooded. Al’s just a good person.” — Catherine Pearson