LIfe brought friend right answers

College alumni magazines are supposed to make you feel nostalgic for the old alma mater and maybe shake loose a donation now and then.
But they’re also a reminder of mortality and the simple, inescapable fact that we’re growing older.
That hit home a few weeks ago.
I’d already learned that morning a retired colleague from one of the better newspaper groups in Indiana was dealing with brain cancer. He’s someone I’d consider an acquaintance more than a buddy. We often sparred over questions of journalism judgment, but I’ve always respected his opinion. And I always knew he respected mine.
Just the same, the words “brain” and “cancer” in a single sentence will send a chill down your spine. And this is a guy in his 70s for whom the regimen of treatment poses a particularly hard road.
Then the alumni magazine arrived in the mail.
Pawing through its pages over a bowl of soup at lunchtime, I found myself turning inevitably to the Class Notes pages where I could either catch up on news from old classmates or find myself scratching my head because the names didn’t ring a bell.
Then, just as inevitably, I turned to the pages near the back that listed the passing of folks I’d gone to college with.
And the news was a little tough. Two guys who had lived in the same dorm with me had died in the past six or nine months.
Ken was a tall guy with a laconic demeanor that belied the fact that he was a brilliant student. He lived one floor down from me, and we were in gym class together. I can’t tell you where he was from, and we went in different directions after our freshman year. I do remember for certain that he was a heck of a lot smarter and more mature than I was back in the day.
Jerry was another story. He was a jock, a football player who lived on the same floor that I lived on. He was from Michigan, was funny and was impressionable. We played “Hearts” together with a couple of other guys for far too many hours in a dorm lounge when we should have been studying.
Jerry was, I recall, worried about his future. He had lots of dreams for a career, but his family owned a successful lumberyard, and there was a lot of pressure to join the family business.
I know that because I read his fortune a few times.
Like a lot of English majors, I put in hours studying T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland.” And, as it did for a lot of English majors, that studying led me to a book called “From Ritual to Romance.” The book linked Eliot’s great poem to the symbolism in a pack of tarot cards, fortune telling cards.
So, like any 1960s idiot, I did the logical thing when the class was done. I bought a pack of tarot cards and a paperback book on how to “interpret” what the cards meant.
It only took an hour or two to realize that the “interpretations” were phrased in such ambiguous ways that they made a newspaper horoscope column look definitive and concrete. In other words, they could mean anything you wanted them to mean.
But at some point, playing with the cards, I went through the process of “doing a reading” for guys on my hall. And Jerry couldn’t get enough.
It was a game for me, but after a few times it was clear that Jerry was taking things far too seriously. It didn’t seem to matter that I was consulting a cheap paperback or that the comments I read were meaningless. He was in search of answers.
And it soon made me uneasy. I picked up on the fact that Jerry was worried about whether he should join the family business and was reaching out in desperation for answers. I wasn’t about to give them and called the whole thing off, retiring the “wicked pack of cards.”
Those days hadn’t crossed my mind in years until the alumni magazine arrived and I was reading his obituary. A smile crossed my face when I learned that — while Jerry died younger than he should have — he had been president of that family-owned lumberyard in Michigan.
He found his right answers. They didn’t come from me. And they certainly didn’t come from a pack of cards.