Tribute to Myron from A.R.Gurney (Pete)

October 17, 2008

ON MYRON

It’s a cliché to say I’ve lost my best friend. But I feel I have, with Myron. In fact, Molly and I were so eager to share our grief with Ingrid and the Stocking boys that I neglected to notice, until just this morning whenwe arrived at the airport, that Delta had erroneously put us on their 8 PM flight to Minneapolis. So all I can do now is remind Ingrid, Ben, Nick, and Tim how much a part of my life he was, and how much I ache in not being able to say so in person.

I’ve known Myron for over fifty years. We’ve shared many Christmases with the Stockings, traveled with them at home and abroad, and connected them many times after they moved to Minneapolis. Myron and I used to play tennis at the West Newton Neighborhood Club every Saturday morning. I enjoyed our talks over a beer afterwards as much as I enjoyed the game. Maybe more so, because the game itself could be tricky. Myron sometimes would do his grotesque eye exercises right before he served, and he wasn’t always accurate about the score. “I can’t recall every point, “ he’d say, “but it feels like deuce.” And maybe it was deuce in some basic way, because I always felt even with Myron, on the court or off. We were very much on the same wave length in those earlier days.

We all know that there came a time when Myron began marching to a different drummer. It was terribly tough on his sons and on Ingrid, and all of them took steps to survive. Nick’s accounts of his excursions were very funny, but I have the sense that we laughed so we didn’t weep. My contact with Myron during these years was mostly by telephone. Our telephone conversations were primarily one-way, though he never lost his rich and complicated way of expressing himself. He was especially obsessed with what he was writing. “I now envision it will come to four volumes,” he’d say. I tried to encourage him to lower his sights a little, but I’m not sure I was persuasive.

Myron did come east now and then, and we loved seeing him. For the most part, he behaved himself, except once, when he got up early and carefully rearranged our kitchen. Another time, he came to New York to see a play of mine and to prove to himself he could travel alone. He chose to come by train and told me he had made friends with everyone aboard. I could believe it. I was initially unable to see much of him because I was still tinkering with my play which was in previews, but when at last I tried to call with him to arrange a meal together, I found he had had some difficulty at his hotel and left to go home. Then, as now, I missed the boat with Myron, and it bugs me.

What is so brutally heartbreaking is that, from all reports and from what I could tell from my recent telephone conversations with him, Myron was turning a corner and was coming back to us. His rehab, apparently, was unusually successful. In his writing, too, if I can judge from his newer blogs, he was returning to the measured and richly articulate vein I have so often admired. For a long time, all of us have been missing the Myron we used to know. It’s a terrible twist that he was taken from us just when he seemed to be coming around. I miss him all the more because of that.