It’s strange how you feel right away that some people are your friends, isn’t it?
— James Salter, Light Years
I first met Nico at a gathering of country-club types. We two misfits clearly didn’t belong at such a party, where the other guests had doused themselves in so much cologne that we were forced to escape our host’s home to catch our breath on the freshly cut grass. “Ah, clean air,” one of us said, it matters not who, for in that moment we bonded for life. It wasn’t only that we had little in common with the others. We soon discovered that Nico and I had gone to the same university and had the same favorite professor, although Nico was a decade my senior. I was a writer, and he had once worked in publishing, though he was now unemployed. He’d also recently gotten divorced and lost custody of his daughter, but he retained an inner light. There was a mischievous glint in his eye that first night as he showed me a banjo-looking instrument he and his daughter had made from a soup can. They called it a “canjo.” I believe Nico brought it along not just as a conversation starter but as a way to feel close to the child he adored but rarely saw.
