My friend (and my running mate Paul Engleman’s beloved wife)

[and my younger friends Joe and Lucie’s beloved mother]

Barb Carney died last Monday night.

She was (still is) poetry, more than prose.

Dappled more than sunny or shaded.

Like the garden that she wrapped around her home.

Philosophically eclectic, spiritually consistent, essentially vigilant.

Gentle. Steely. A little world-weary. Still curious. And always prepared for the very next thing you said to be funny as hell.

I could go on, and I hope others will.

But you gotta be careful, writing about Barb:

I once told her I was considering writing a diary of my wife’s cancer treatment

And she said as strongly as she ever said anything to me, “Please don’t!”

She also thought Joan Didion’s book about her spouse’s death, The Year of Magical Thinking

Was endlessly self-indulgent.

So I’d rather offer a single observation, to remember Barb

(and Barb knows what I’m about to say next because we joked about it):

When Barb offered you coffee

After dinner at their house—

And she always did—

you felt loved in a way

that you vaguely understood

that you hadn’t felt loved in a while.

Or maybe ever, before.

Barb had as good an understanding

Of what we are doing on this planet—

(Kurt Vonnegut said it was to “help each other

get through this thing, whatever it is”)—

As anyone I’ve known.

And she loved this song.

Let’s hum along.

I grew up in a quiet house. Shy writer parents, in a small Ohio town. I was my dad’s best friend. My little sister was my mother’s. If the phone rang, my dad bellowed, “Who could that be?” And if the doorbell rang! My sister and I knew it had better not be one of our friends (of whom we only had small handful of each, ourselves).

My life—in Chicago and through my work, around the world—became an existence no more fathomable or manageable to my parents than Frank Sinatra’s or Taylor Swift’s.

My parents, or me.

I don’t know how to handle this. How much longer can I keep this up before my brain/heart/soul/life explodes?

The answer is, the friends I choose, and who seem to choose me: usually, people who have a lot of their own people, and so they understand. In any case, they are so much more graceful about it than I am.

For instance, they don’t write shit like this, about how anxious they are about all the friends they have. Jesus!

But anyway, here’s what some of my people looked like last weekend in the Michigan woods. After a similar gathering last year, I called them, “a group of friends the loving, honest, soulful, funny likes of which even my own good fortune never began to prepare me to deal with.”

Never even began.

CAPTION: AI OIL-PAINTING TREATMENT BY EVENT ORGANIZER JOE RILEY, PICTURED IN BLACK T-SHIRT, TOP MIDDLE.