This morning, I found out that my best friend from childhood, Neal J. Zimmerman, died….four years ago.  What a shock! He was only 64 years old. “When I’m 64…”  echoes in my head and has haunted me all day.   I had been thinking of him lately. In applying for an online account, one security question was: “Who was your best friend in childhood?” I immediately thought of him and decided to Google his name. In the picture posted on the online obituary, I was startled to see that we looked alike. We didn’t look alike as kids.  For years, I had thought about looking him up, re-connecting after so long.  Now I feel guilty that I never did, particularly that it’s been four years since he died.                                                                                                                                                              As kids, we complemented each other.  I was the studious one; he was the bad boy.  As teenagers back in the day when being a hoodlum was owing money on a library book, Neal was my muse.  When I would stop by his home looking for him, if his mother said that he was at the library studying, I knew that was his code for telling me that he was playing poker with the boys and smoking in our ‘hangout’ , a basement in our garden apartment complex that we called the humidor.  That’s where he hid the cigarettes. His mother nicknamed MY younger brother the ‘vilder chaiah’, a Yiddish expression meaning a wild animal, out of control kid.  (The vilder chaiah is now a successful endocrinologist in Florida). When Neal was old enough to drive, we would take his father’s  ’57 Chevy for joyrides at night.  Neal was so short that he sat on phone books to reach the gas and brake pedals. It was a wonder that the cops never stopped us. We thought that we were getting away with it but his father was on to us. In the morning, his dad, Dick, would go to the garage and feel the hood.  If it were still warm, he knew what we had been up to the night before. One night while cruising the main drag in our neighborhood, Union Turnpike, Neal was so distracted watching a pretty girl walk down the street, he crashed into a parked car. No one was hurt but he was scared to tell his old man. His dad laughed when he heard the story; he understood adolescent raging hormones.  Dick often reminded us of his own claim to fame;  during WWII, he got into a drunken  brawl with Lou Costello (remember Abbot & Costello) . Who knows?

.         Neal was years ahead of his time. To impress the girls, he took an old rotary phone and put it on the dashboard.  At red lights, he would pick it up pretend to talk to someone.  The girls in the car alongside would stare in amazement, not noticing that the phone cord wasn’t connected to anything. I heard from mutual friends that Neal became an architect and had  written a book on designing  the home office. I became a psychotherapist and a writer too, and what a surprise.  As  a group psychotherapist  writing about boundaries, I too had published a book about the home office setting but from a completely different vantage point. I wanted to call him and talk about this odd coincidence. I regret that I never did. And I must admit, that I couldn’t help but check Amazon to compare our book sales. Both were  way down the list.  I’m sure he would have gotten a kick out of knowing that.