My friend Bernie

It was the standing joke between us that sometime in the near future, Bernie finally would write a lengthy letter telling me all that's happened in his life since we first met as childhood friends.

This promise happened year after year, Christmas after Christmas.

We did, in fact, exchange Christmas cards every year, complete with little notes inside updating key moments in our lives: surgeries, cruises, teams we liked, whiskeys we sipped, books we read, movies we saw. Stuff like that.

Bernie and I toast our friendship.

 We first met more than 65 years ago in a little town – a borough, actually – named Fountain Hill, PA, which was snuggled comfortably in the hillocks between Allentown and Bethlehem. Interestingly enough, I don't remember the particulars of our first meeting. But I'll bet it was in the borough playground, which was just across the street from where we lived on Stanley Avenue. I was probably 6 years old, Bernie was 5.

In those days, the playground was the beating heart of the Fountain Hill community and I'm guessing we might have met on the swings or the sliding boards of what most of us Hillers now fondly remember as this incredibly magical place to live. I swear it was a kind of Heaven on Earth that somehow helped mold us into the people we are today. Most Hillers still swear to that.

Anyway, no matter how Bernie and I first met, the friendship stuck. It stuck through measles and chicken pox. It stuck when Bernie got hit by a car while crossing the street to get to the playground (he escaped serious injury and was back on the playground within days). It stuck even though we went to two different schools – he went to St. Ursula's and I went to Stevens.

Bernie Gillen

 We'd flip baseball cards on the front porch of our house. We'd play in the little runoff creek that bordered the playground across the street from us, building beaver-type dams and catching crayfish. We'd play army in the woods nearby and run the bases on the Little League field next to the playground. We were inseparable.

But it didn't last. Dad changed jobs, we moved to Portsmouth, NH, and consequently, Bernie and I lost touch. Kids don't usually write letters to each other. They usually don't pick up the phone and call. Instead of each other's shadow, we were now each other's ghost.

 This separation lasted for years, and even though our family returned to Bethlehem so that Dad could attend Moravian Theological Seminary, Bernie and I never reconnected. Ghosts.

But then this happened: Because Dad had been assigned a church in nearby Coopersburg, I'd gone to Southern Lehigh for high school. Twenty-five years later, I decided to go to our 25th class reunion and so Kim and I drove the 500 miles up to Pennsylvania from North Carolina. We were milling around the banquet hall when, out of the blue, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and this pleasant looking fellow said, "Bruce, do you remember me?" 

I didn't. I had no clue. There was no name tag.

"I'm Bernie Gillen."

I took a quick look into his face as the memories flashed by and I could see it was him. We embraced. I nearly cried.

But how could this be? Bernie did not go to Southern Lehigh. He went to Bethlehem Catholic. How could this be?

Do you believe in serendipity? Do you believe in synchronicity? Do you believe in magic?

It turns out Bernie had married a girl in my class, Betsy Heimbach, and that's why he was here. And maybe, for this moment, that's why I was here, too. What were the odds?

We talked, we reminisced, we exchanged numbers and addresses and promised this time to stay in touch.

And we did, mostly through Christmas cards.

Bernie's Christmas cards were an adventure. His handwriting was atrocious and his little notes inside those cards were written in what amounted to be an undecipherable code. It could have been Latin, for all I knew. Didn't matter. I usually got the gist. A key word here and there always helped.

This kept up until my 50th class reunion approached five years ago. I asked him if he and Betsy were going, but he thought probably not. Then Kim suggested that we meet on our own while we were in Pennsylvania. And better yet, why not meet at the playground?

And so we did. We shared more memories, he treated us to a Philly cheesesteak lunch. And, at the alcohol-free playground, I broke out the champagne that I brought and we toasted our friendship, which was then in its 63rd year.

A few more Christmases came and went, complete with notes but never the lengthy letter. Typical.

The card we got this past Christmas had his shortest unreadable note ever.

"Why don't you just pick up the phone and call him?" scolded Kim in all her wisdom. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," I said. "Maybe later."

On Thursday, Kim called me from work. She'd been on the "You Know You're From Fountain Hill" site on Facebook, where the RIP's were piling up under Bernie's class picture from 1966. My throat clenched.

A little later, a friend of Bernie's from the Fountain Hill days, Bob Spirk, called me at Betsy's request to confirm that Bernie had passed. Bernie was 71 and had died of heart failure.

Our friendship ultimately spanned 68 years. I think about that. The corporeal friendship is over now, but the spiritual friendship will last into perpetuity.

Quieti tam amicus meus.

Rest well, my friend.