April 20, 2020--My Friend Frank Brecher

We met for the first time when we were both in our ninth decade. 

Not the best arrangement, many would claim, with so little time presumably remaining, to be thinking about making friends. 

For folks our age, likely settled in our ways and beliefs, there is usually not much psychic space left to make the adjustments required for a relationship that seeks to become a friendship. Much less provide the motivation to even consider it.

But Frank Brecher and I quickly discovered that though we in fact were set in many ways, enough of them were complementary and thus what was developing between us might turn out to be deep and substantial.

We grew up on the streets. He in the Bronx, me in Brooklyn. In many ways at the time there were few differences between someone who hung out on the Grand Concourse or on Eastern Parkway. A Jewish kid was a Jewish kid.

Our neighborhoods were middle-class ghettos, rife with street crime but with enough opportunity to make something of one's self. If we were lucky enough to survive. Survive physically, and do well enough in school to make being admitted to college a possibility, with a college education seen as a ticket out, which in both of our cases turned out to be what happened. 

As our friendship developed we discovered that a love of history was a common denominator. Though a Foreign Service officer for decades, Frank was also the author of a half dozen books, including most recently, the highly-regarded Securing American Independence, that focuses on John Jay, a senior diplomat during the Revolutionary War and America's first Chief Justice. And I am a voracious reader of history, wanting to learn all I can from the past about what it means to be American.

But more profoundly, for the few years we shared before he died two days ago from the coronavirus, thinking in friendship terms may not be the best way to consider our relationship.

We became more than friends. Rather, members of an intentional family. We spoke the same meta-language, our instincts were aligned, and over time we became brothers.