advent journal: the squash of friendship

My birthday gift this year was Burt Burleson, my most enduring friend whom I have known

for almost fifty years. As a third-culture kid who moved around most of my life, I lost track of those I knew in my childhood and adolescence. Burt and I met in the fall of 1976. I can remember calling him in the fall of 1986 to say he was the first friend I had had in my life that I had known for ten years and known where they were all ten of those years.

He and Ginger hatched a plan that gave Burt and I the better part of a week together (hence why I haven’t kept up my Advent Journal the last few nights) and the time was filled with good things. I took him to the airport in Hartford early this morning and came home to find that he had left a leather box for me--one I recognized because I left it at his house when I was there a couple of years ago. Inside was a dehydrated summer squash, a tradition we began quite by accident several decades ago.

It was the perfect parting gift. My thank you note to Burt is this poem.

the squash of friendship

if you asked for a list of all the metaphors that might carry the meaning of friendship a dried summer squash would not rank highly if at all, were it not

for the time I snuck a squash into your suitcase at the close of a visit and then found it tucked in mine the next time I came to see you; without

knowing much about how to dry a vegetable we kept that same one around for a decade until it got lost like luggage at LaGuardia

so when I got back from taking you to the airport after your surprise visit and saw the squash I left at your house two years ago I felt nourished and loved

the wrinkled remains of a fairly standard squash that dried out instead of spoil is a strong symbol of friendship particularly when housed in a fancy leather fountain pen box

mostly because friendship is not valuable because it produces or accomplishes anything; it offers no guaranteed return on investment; it matters more than measurement

thank you my summer squash friend for a love for no reason, a story without a moral, a scavenger hunt of hope that have kept me alive; in a world that wants answers we have a squash

Peace, Milton