Friend

I was prepared to write about something else tonight, maybe Hillary Clinton's latest crime against her party, maybe John McCain's peevish outburst to a reporter, maybe Barack Obama's positive efforts to keep the debate real rather than manufactured against all sides firing in on him.

Instead, I am sad to report, it's to be a brief eulogy for a livelong friend, or as long as four whole decades, 40 years, will get you. My dear buddy, my fellow droog, Mark Sander, died way too young late today, and if you have a few moments I'll tell you about him.

I grew up in a small town bedroom community for the New York State Capital, Albany, called Delmar. When I was eight years old our family moved from one street on Delmar to another, where my folks had a house built. One afternoon after school I biked from our house to our future home, where the basement had been dug but the foundation not yet laid.

It was an independent moment, the type of thing I'd be loathe to let my current eight year-old do on his own. As I walked my bike around the excavation, the light starting to fade, I ran into another boy, one year older than me, wearing glasses like me, standing with his arms crossed, imperial.

Feeling cheery and excited about the impending neighborhood change, I went up to the boy and said, "I'm moving here. This is going to be my house."

To which he replied, in a fool-suffering tone I'd come to love over the many years ahead, "I know!"

Mark had the same name as me, although over time we referred to each other as "Mo" and eventually he retained rights to that nickname amongst our close "droog" friends and I took on the distinction of "Moses". Mo lived two doors away, with our good buddy, Andrew, who became known as "Crunch", living between us. We talked politics in those days -- Crunch being the Buckley-esque Republican conservative flanked by two Democratic liberals. Although both of those guys were a year ahead of me in school, they were my gang, making sure I took up the rarely played contra alto clarinet in order to advance to the upper level band, grooming me to follow their lead in model congress, procuring our first booze together.

Over the years Mo continued to provide friendship and support. When I moved to NYC after college it was his couch I slept on, in his tiny, shared Greenwich Village tenement, until I found a place. He helped me get work, in a Wall Street executive (broker) search firm and then at Princeton Review, where I both tutored and wrote the company's first LSAT manual. He was instrumental in putting together the annual summer weekend gathering of the ten droogs, starting in our twenties and continuing through today. And he both read and contributed comments to this very blog.

Mo was born with certain physical conditions that gave him a stilted (imperial?) stride as a kid. His first nickname was penguin, or "pengy", but he took it in the best possible way, by putting up a huge poster of hundreds of penguins on an ice floe. But this was the seed of his later physical ailments including sciatic problems and ultimately a pacemaker, difficulty walking even with a cane, and several alarming hospital stints over the past year.

For somebody with such heart trouble he had the largest heart of all, leaving behind a devoted wife and three irresistible young daughters, scores or devoted graduates of his Advantage Testing prep service in Boston, and a network of devoted friends stretching from Delmar to Princeton to New York to Boston and even to here in Santa Monica.

There was no one I enjoyed talking to more about politics, no one I enjoyed chortling with more about the sometimes violent absurdities of life, no one who was ever more loyal or trustworthy, no one with a better attitude towards his own ailments.

Maybe it's still too early or maybe I'll never be able to put the right words one after the other to describe Mark properly. But if you've been lucky enough to have a similar friend in your life, then maybe you understand.

The grieving will take awhile, I'm already missing him achingly, but it's never too early to celebrate such a man, such a life.

Here's to you, Mo. Let's ride that long lonesome train together tonight.