People live and die, that’s the usual order, unless you believe in reincarnation. There is also another way that people can disappear from your life. They stop working, they move, they isolate themselves, in short, they choose – forced or not – for another life.
They can be close acquaintances, leaving a painful goodbye, but I’ve noticed that it doesn’t have to be friends or relatives that you suddenly miss. It can also concern people with whom you have interacted only superficially and who have nevertheless been important to you.
Shopkeepers for example. I recently had to visit my optician who had given me good advice for my glasses for twenty years. He helped me at least as much as all my ophthalmologists put together. He once made an operation superfluous by providing a glass with a useful prism – no ophthalmologist had come up with the idea. If he put on new glasses, it would take him ten minutes to carefully position them on your nose. He crept around you, distanced himself, moved closer, rearranged and rearranged until you no longer felt glasses. “Very well?”
Great craftsman. With such a person you only have to come back once a year to have something adjusted. He was gone, an assistant said this time, he had been enjoying a well-deserved retirement for a while. He had sold his shop to “a chain”; that was not yet to be made public, so they kept the old name for the time being. She started fiddling with my glasses and I knew right away: this won’t work.
The successor was called in, a man who looked at me sullenly, put the glasses on and off once and then gestured that this should be enough and other tasks called to him. In the meantime, the assistant had made some adjustments to a spare pair of glasses that I had also brought with me.
At home, both glasses turned out to be a kind of clamping screw. I went back a few more times – in vain. Marcel, where are you, I wanted to shout, but I realized that I had to give him his pension.
Shortly afterwards, Guus also appeared to have stopped with it. Guus was our humble, always friendly and dedicated shoemaker for many years. In recent years, like so many others, I had become somewhat unfaithful to him by fashionably switching to the type of sneaker with synthetic soles that would make no shoemaker richer.
If I ever went there, Guus never showed anything, he suffered in the silence of his workshop. Suddenly he was also retired, as witnessed by a note on his permanently closed door, in which he referred collegiately to another shoemaker, a persistent one a few kilometers away.
While Marcel and Guus silently disappeared from my life, Gemma, a sympathetic neighbor, also decided to broaden her horizons. She said she sold her house and moved in with her boyfriend. That was bad news, except for her and, I assume, her boyfriend. Every neighborhood has a social soul, someone who maintains the contacts and organizes the meetings – she was such a soul. The pandemic was an intolerable bummer for her, her annual ‘bridge drink’ had to be canceled twice.
Cherish such people, they are rare. Remember, once they’re gone, they won’t come back.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 12, 2022
#Column #People