My Old Friend's Son
by Elina Hemink
Recently, by coincidence, I came across an old friend as I was exiting the Baskin-Robbins in town.
When I was in college many years ago, approaching the end of the fourth year, this person and I used to say to each other, “God, I’m never going to finish this thesis on time.” In doing so, we consoled each other, and simultaneously used the other’s lateness in writing their thesis as a measure of one’s own safety net.
Then, two years later when it so happened that we were in the same graduate program, we used to say to each other, “God, I’m never going to finish this dissertation on time.” My old friend was thus my two-time comrade in coffee-fueled, red-eyed sprints to the supervising professor’s office in the last hour before final deadlines.
It was twenty years ago that he was such a boy. When I came across him all of a sudden, he was a thoroughly middle-aged man. Which means, of course, that I too am a thoroughly middle-aged version of the young lady he saw running down university corridors. Time doesn’t discriminate, after all.
Looking back, even within the small circle of students in our department, he was the subject of not a few mutters between our classmates along the lines of, “Yes, well, that guy… he’s kinda… how do I say it?”. Simply put, he was the uncontested recipient of highest praise for being eccentric.
He could speak Spanish and German fluently, and within the already rather inconsequential Classics department he’d decided to study ancient texts. In order to study a topic of debatable significance to humans in the twenty-first century, he thus additionally acquired Hebrew and Koine Greek. He was well versed in Western and Eastern history and was intimate with German philosophers in every way except physical. He went through books like oxygen. From professors, he received genuine compliments for studying hard. I was jealous of him.
He was also the guy who set up a sleeping nook for himself in the shared research lab, and always wore the same ragged T-shirt through which one could see the outlines of his bony back, and asked his classmates if they were going to finish their bag of Hot Cheetos. One time, he was scolded by administrators for washing his hair in the sink of the faculty break room.
That bright misfit stood before me twenty years later as a softened middle-aged man with gentle wrinkles at the edges of his eyes, now a professor in a community college. “Wow, that’s great,” I said, “I’m just a stay-at-home mom now. I have three kids.”
Without a moment’s pause, he blurted, “You’ve lost weight! Cancer?”
Indeed, my cheeks were no longer plump like they were when I was young, and hell, he could call me haggard if he liked but surely there was a better option than suddenly asking if I had cancer? I took back all illusory thoughts that the rough edges of his youth had been polished and rounded by time, and that he now possessed some common sense and delicacy. He had not changed a bit. I suppressed the urge to offer to sew his lips shut and said instead, “Well, you’ve certainly gained just as much!”
“Have I?” He laughed, “It’s just that I had cancer ten years ago.”
For a moment, I couldn’t speak. “Sorry to hear that,” I finally managed, my voice stumbling over the awkwardness of such small words for such a big thing. What could anyone say, really, when someone lays bare a scar like that? I felt clumsy, but his unvarnished honesty left no room for polite evasions.
He nodded and continued. About ten years ago he had been diagnosed with cancer, and had to have a ball of a certain significance removed. “I got to keep one ball, but I still had to go through radiation therapy so the doctor told me I wouldn’t be able to have kids, which I was pretty bummed about because I did want kids eventually…” But he was only thirty-two at the time, with many things still to experience and achieve in life. The choice was inevitable. He tearfully bartered his testicles for five or so more decades of life.
He fortunately recovered, and has come up to this point without a relapse. And recently, at this milestone of ten years since his sickness, he married a woman with a son from a previous marriage. This boy is around the same age as my youngest daughter, whose hand I was holding as this conversation took place, and had apparently called him “dad” on the same day they said “hello” to each other for the first time.
The boy was a mischievous one according to him, with perpetually scabbed knees and unwilling to leave the playground even when the sun went down. If there was a puddle, he would take his shoes and socks off to wade in it, and in fact if there were no one to stop him he might even try to take his clothes off. On weekdays he could rampage all he desired with his classmates in kindergarten, but on weekends his mother and new dad were required to go to great lengths to expend his overflowing supply of energy.
“I’m sure there’s a lot of difficulties that come with being a stepfather, but when I met my son for the first time, I thought, this is it! Because really, it doesn’t matter to me if I share blood with my kid.” It was clear that this little boy who had entered the picture without warning had swiftly become a source of great joy in my old friend’s life. He continued, “I mean, it’s a lot of effort on my part, and he knows nothing about order or planning, and his next move is impossible to predict. I bet even Leibniz never knew a creature like him, but that’s also his charm.”
I patted my five year old daughter’s head as I listened. “It’s uncompelling of me to say, raising three kids that are my own, but I don’t think it matters at all either. Being a parent, it has nothing to do with blood.” I said, and I really thought so. “It’s about choosing to show up for them each day, to show up for the chaos and surprises, and also for the mundane and routine.”
He smiled with a combination of relief and pride. He explained that he had come to town to buy ice cream to bring home to his son, as he had a rare weekday afternoon free of lectures. Having been single and immersed in study for a long time, he didn’t know how to go about the business of choosing which ones to buy.
“Maybe you could get a variety pack with six ice creams, since if you get a pack of four for a family of three you’ll just have one left over?” I offered. No child wouldn’t light up at the sight of six different ice creams nestled in a bright pink and blue box. As for flavor, I suggested the classics—vanilla, chocolate and strawberry—and something fun and colorful for his son, like cotton candy or rainbow sherbet, or the green and white one with popping candy.
“Which one would I like though?” He asked, catching me off guard. Wasn’t he trying to pick out ice creams to delight his son and wife? Still, I humored him. I told him that the men I knew tended to like rocky road, the chocolate-flavored one with nuts and bits of marshmallows.
We parted ways with a casual “Bye then.”
The doorbell jingled as my friend walked into the ice cream shop, and as the sound faded with the door shutting behind him, I was brought back to the street, my daughter’s hand in mine. I would start preparing dinner once we got home, and she would bumble about my feet singing a song from television, or perhaps try her luck again to win her big brothers’ attention.
✶✶✶
“He’s like a feral horse, like a runaway train!”
I hoped the little boy, lovingly described to me by his father as such, would enjoy the ice creams suggested by a woman he doesn’t know.
He had been many things: a "genius," an "oddity," and someone who glimpsed death’s shadow too early. Yet, knowing him now—a father buying ice cream on a sunny afternoon—it struck me how much life could shift without losing its essence. Here was a man once caught up in lofty intellectual pursuits, now preoccupied with playground scrapes and sugar rushes. It wasn’t a dramatic reinvention, but rather a gentle reshaping, as if his life had been folded into something humbler and warmer; something both ordinary and extraordinary. I found this a very happy transformation, forged by choices both unavoidable and deliberate.
It was a comforting thought that such transformations happen all the time. Happiness must be generated copiously, I thought, radiating from lives and places that barely intersect with my own, unassumingly but surely in any corner of the city.
Writer’s Note
Elina Hemink is a 24 year-old master’s student in data science and AI. She loves to immerse herself in exploring what it means to live a human experience, particularly through art, music, and literature. Elina lives for museum visits, cuddles with her cat, and thoughtful discussions over coffee.