It’s taken a while to get this year off to a reasonable start…

Happy New Year!

This is my New Year’s wish to you…

I once heard someone say that friendship is a long conversation, which seems nearly right to me.

Words are often free flowing and disembodied, like angels winging through pure discourse. Just once, though, I’d like to imagine those angels with bottles of beer in their hands and mustard stains on their gowns from wolfing down the occasional celestial Hebrew National frankfurter (with kraut, of course). After all, Louis Malle’s paean to pals was called My Dinner with Andre, not My Long Conversation with Andre.

A friend is hardly a friend if you can’t eat together and otherwise imbibe in spirits. In fact, I’ll dare say that what sex is to lovers, food is to friends, and any recipe for friendship ends up watery without a soup stock that nourishes the body and inspires, or at least gratifies, the palate, the better to release the intellect and encourage the soul.

Friendship is a long meal with plenty of gab (hostile or passionate, the flavor doesn’t matter) served by someone who takes pride in mischief, sympathy, and surprise. We reserve the right to not seat posers who pretend they are guardians of high culture. Finally, no innocents allowed either, that is, unless they’ve paid their dues to friendship by joining in the fray, risking the barbed words or poignant disappointments that true friendship seems unable to avoid.

But I suppose there is a hidden grace in that. I would never speak to my enemies, either in confidence or in anger, the way I speak to my friends.

I met Captain Bob on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands off Spain, where he and his extraordinary wife, Brianne, were treasure hunters, honest ones, operating a primitive, two table island style restaurant. What they gave me most was food and forthrightness and medicinal doses of hell, which are complimentary ingredients in any friendship worth cultivating.

Captain Bob could render a red snapper into an elegant pleasure, and being far from civilization, I appreciated that. I think Bob’s first words to me were, “You’re not traveling with any anchovy paste in your luggage, are you? No? What a pity.”

Food brought us together and, during the wilder, rougher, more volatile moments of our friendship, which were frequent, food kept us together: a fresh start on a new day, a common denominator broadcasting our affection for each other when, in the course of vigorously exercising the scope of our friendship, the relationship began to look like an unnatural pairing not unlike dogs and cats, Israelis and Arabs, or Edward Norton and Courtney Love.

Because the food was good, it segued into conversation. Because the conversation was good, it led to storytelling and lies, and because the stories were good and the lies were even better, we quickly established the habit of endless all night arguments, irrigated by rum and cooled by European northerlies.

We covered everything: cooking, culture, and counterculture, politics, aesthetics, music, corruption and failure, and happiness. We’d argue about arguing, and when we got tired of arguing in English we’d argue in gibberish, pausing only long enough to raid the refrigerator or to open a tin of sardines in tomato chili sauce.

Since we’d met, we adventured together, sailed one or two of the seven seas, been lost together in the heart of darkness, relaxed like shipwrecked kings in the glorious balmy light of the islands, bunked together, cooked together, crawled home together and mourned together, all of those days punctuated with high doses of schmoozing, gentle and loving, sarcastic and sharp-witted or, just as readily, when it seemed inevitable, confrontational and bitter.

No matter how savage the night, though, in the morning we didn’t even bother being contrite. Captain Bob, red-eyed, would say, with the plain goodwill that keeps the world and all friendships together, “What can I fix you to eat, my friend?” and there we were again, united in fellowship against all the deaths and betrayals and disappointments that haunt a life, fortifying ourselves to carry on in the best humor we could manage.

The food doesn’t repair so much as remind us we’ve done all the preliminary work and don’t need to beat around the bush.

We’re friends. It’s not so easy to establish rapport in these overly politically-correct days, but we’re friends, true friends: whatever we do, it’s not a waste of time.

More than three centuries ago, the English poet Ben Jonson, while inviting, in verse, a friend to feast, suggested that no matter how much they stuffed themselves and indulged in wine during the course of the evening, they should nevertheless part as innocently as they met, without guilt.

“No simple word” Jonson wrote, foreseeing just such a friend and dining companion as me, “that shall be uttered at our mirthful union, shall make us sad the next morning; we shall enjoy the night.”

So, to all my friends (including former, and exes) whom I have hurt, made sad, or inhibited the liberty of their affections, or generally appalled, injured, or treated like the scoundrels they might for a moment have been, let me extend Captain Bob’s invitation as if it were my very own: “What can I fix you to eat, my friend?”