Transitory Friends

February 11, 1997

Polonius is usually played as a pompous toadie to King Claudius in HAMLET. Yet Shakespeare has Polonius say to Laertes, his son:

“Those friends thou hast, and their
adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul
with hoops of steel.”

Splendid advice. However, in our mobile society, friendships can become transitory. We move, and even good friends are memories not intimates. That has been true for me, and I have reflected with some sadness on that experience many times.

Recently I have been remembering my friend, “Woofie” – his given name was Wilfred, but only the 5th and 6th grade teachers called him that. To everyone else he was Woofie. I never met his parents, so I don’t know what they called him.

I must have been 11 years old and in the 6th grade. I started thinking again about Woofie after seeing Al Pacino’s movie about Richard III, particularly the battle at Bosworth Field where Richard vainly cries, “A horse! a horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

You see, it was Woofie who provided me with my one and only experience on a horse.

Woofie, although a year or two older than I, was in the same grade at school. He had been “kept back”, as we used to say, a couple of times. Although older, he was shorter than I was, but stocky and strong. He had told me more than once that he was going to run away from home so he could be a jockey.

So it must have come about that he knew I had never been on a horse. So, one Saturday morning who should arrive at my home but Woofie and a horse. He told me the horse belonged to his father and maybe it did. It was a work-horse and usually pulled a dump cart.

The horse was large! In order to mount I had to stand on the top step of the front stoop. We both climbed on, riding bareback with Woofie holding the reins. I doubt if any saddle could fit its huge back. Astride the horse, my legs were straight out; the horse’s back was that broad. I remember that it was not that comfortable. We rode for a couple of streets. The horse walked. I doubt if it could trot, let alone run. That’s my only experience horse-back riding.

That same year Woofie and I got into trouble at school. We were playing catch on the school grounds and the ball broke a classroom window; “Run”, said Woofie and we ran. Of course we were known and severely reprimanded. I can’t remember who paid for the window, my parents, perhaps.

Woofie then got into big trouble. He was sent to the principal’s office, Mr. Arnold. Mr. Arnold was a slight, gray-haired man to the best of my recollection. His office was on the second floor of Horace Mann School.

Woofie stopped me on the way home and told me that he had “thrown Mr. Arnold down a flight of stairs.” I had doubts that Mr. Arnold was “thrown” but he might have been pushed. Woofie was capable of that.

I never saw Woofie again. He was expelled from school and ran away from home. I doubt if he became a jockey, he would have been too heavy. But he might have become a groomer or a trainer. I have hoped from time to time that he made out O.K. Shakespeare has Marianna say to Isabel (MEASURE FOR MEASURE, Act V, Sc. 1):

“They say best men are moulded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much better
For being a little bad...”

When I read that, Woofie is one of those I think about.

A paragraph by Paula Spencer in the current “Reader’s Digest” was another stimulus to write about Woofie:

“Because in addition to our friends of the heart – the traditional, everlasting ideal – it is rich with friends of the road who, like James Michener’s cowpokes, herd with you for a particular stretch and no farther. These brief friendships are equally intense, equally necessary, equally worth treasuring as any other, and for the duration of that ride you can’t survive without them.”