Burpee, Carpenter & Hutchins Funeral Home

Dear Carol,

I am in tears and beside myself with sorrow. I met Barry in 1965 when I started junior high school (translation: 7th grade), and we immediately became best friends, bonding over a love of pop music and stamp collecting. He lived on Walton Ave., I lived two blocks away on Creston. Along with Michael Klein, we comprised the entire membership of the Creston Stamp Club, and spent weekends at record shops and in lower Manhattan at what was then a small stretch of stamp collectors’ specialty shops. It was on one of those trips downtown that Barry told me about the two buildings that were soon to begin construction that would be the tallest buildings in the world. He spoke of them with pride because his father was a Port Authority police sergeant. I remember another time, after we’d been friends for a several months, when he told me that he had juvenile diabetes – something I’d never heard of before. Hearing that my fellow twelve-year-old had to give himself a shot every day to keep himself alive just knocked the wind out of me; Barry gave me my first lesson on the fragility of life.

Unfortunately, after our two years of junior high, Barry and I took off for different high schools, and our interactions became less and less frequent. (We also had radically different politics. Barry’s bedroom window might have been the only one in that section of the Bronx to have a Nixon for President poster proudly facing outward toward the street.)

Five years ago, out of the blue, Barry wrote a lovely email to my sister after reading an article by her --- an email that she forwarded to me. I think I wrote Barry a short note of greetings, intending to get back to him with a longer missive. Time went on, and just yesterday I decided to track him down, and found out the devastating news. I am so filled with regret. What you wrote about him, Carol --- who he was when you met him, and what he did with his life since he left the Bronx --- makes me realize that I would have loved having him as a friend again. What a guy. What a loyal pal he was. What a one-of-a-kind person. Now I’ll have to wait to meet him again on the other side, where we can once again share notes on postage stamps and LBJ and 45 rpm records.