Practicing Friendship

Somewhere around the thirtieth minute of my argument with longtime Sun contributor Sparrow, my traveling companion—and founder of The Sun—Sy Safransky, excused himself to lie down on Sparrow’s couch. Sparrow and I continued quarrelling without missing a beat. This wasn’t how I’d imagined the trip going.

I should clarify that I’m not typically argumentative—you might even say I can be pathologically agreeable—but Sparrow disliked the Beatles so much that he’d written a whole book about it, and I couldn’t resist grilling him on his reasons. They were underwhelming. Here’s a passage from the book:

Every time I confront one of their songs, I have the same reaction: for the first six seconds I am supernally elated—then the tedium of hearing these notes for the 3,428th time sets in. A certain deadness comes over me. I can’t summon back the past. I can’t live in 1964 again.

My arguments for the sublimity of “The Long and Winding Road” or the subversiveness of “Tomorrow Never Knows” were met with a shrug. Jazz, he said. He preferred jazz. (I’m being reductive here for effect, but the gist was: Sparrow is tired of the classic-rock canon.)

In fairness, I haven’t heard these songs 3,428 times, though I suspect my number is higher than average for someone my age—almost forty. And I wasn’t there in 1964, so their music is a sort of time machine for me. Try telling that to an apoplectic Sparrow, though.

Sy and I were visiting him in his double-wide in Phoenicia, New York, the place he’s called home for about twenty-five years. (He once wrote of Phoenicia, “Everyone we meet has a lost, distracted look, as if they’ve already watched their entire video collection twice and now spend their evenings staring up at the spot where two walls meet the ceiling.”) Sy and I were staying in nearby Rhinebeck, which Sparrow dismissed as a playground of the bourgeoisie. He wasn’t wrong. Rhinebeck’s one of those towns where the gas station is built from brick and looks like a colonial cottage, and there’s a forty-something-dollar-a-plate restaurant named after a Grateful Dead album. The public trash cans tell you what not to put in them, and people comply. That sort of place.

Phoenicia, on the other hand, is a little more rustic and a lot more remote, with a down-and-out hippie undercurrent that I suspect arises from its proximity to the shaggy counterculture mecca of Woodstock. The wind was almost constant, and a dusting of snow hung on in the shaded spots of Sparrow’s yard. A rim of salt residue edged the roads. Sy and I, having flown from temperate North Carolina, pulled our jackets tighter around ourselves.

Sparrow lives there with his wife, Violet Snow (aka Ellen Carter), also a Sun contributor, who immediately charmed me by being the first person I’ve ever met, outside of my hometown, who already knew an Askey. I could tell Violet provided a kind of quiet ballast to Sparrow’s manic energy, and I liked her a lot. Along with their daughter, Sylvia, who is pursuing her PhD at New York University, they are a family of eccentric intellectuals: the sort Noah Baumbach might make a movie about. The son of committed communists, Sparrow spent two years at Cornell before dropping out. Violet was educated at Dartmouth and is a polyglot. A computer programmer in the 1980s, she is currently learning to communicate nonverbally with horses. (Her Instagram has some pretty incredible shots of the animals she works with.) Much of their floor space was dedicated to stacks of books and periodicals, many of which contained their work. A television was conspicuously absent. Cell service was nil. I suspected if I were to turn on a radio, I’d have been met with static.

Sparrow and I managed to put aside our differences long enough to find a few areas of agreement: a mutual adoration of Willa Cather’s writing and Whit Stillman’s filmmaking; a mutual indifference toward Hunter S. Thompson. Violet excused herself to get some things done, but Sy roused himself from the couch, and Sparrow offered us a tour of the double-wide.

While we stopped in the bedroom to listen to what is surely the most battered copy of Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes in the Western hemisphere, Sparrow and Sy discussed their daily routines and their wives’ decorating preferences. This was more what I’d been hoping for: to see these two interact. The Sun has been regularly publishing Sparrow since 1982, and his irreverent, often humorous writing is well known to dedicated readers. Some have even suggested Sparrow is Sy’s alter ego. (Sparrow once told Sy, “You basically invented me!”)

Having spent time with them, I can tell you they are not alter egos but more like long-lost brothers: both Jews from New York—“the City,” as it’s called by everyone here—with an interest in Eastern mysticism, who read more than anyone I know and live according to their principles, consequences be damned. Sparrow, for instance, has always survived on a tiny income—the most he ever made in a year was $10,231—as a mute protest against American materialism. (“If I made less than a certain amount of money every year, I wouldn’t have to pay taxes,” he once wrote. “No taxes meant no bullets being bought with my dollars.”) Sy has refused any advertising in his magazine since June 1990, and weathered many lean years as a consequence. There’s no shortage of well-deserved criticism that men of their generation have inspired, but these two strike me as true hippies, though they both balk at that term. Sparrow describes himself as a straight-edge punk; Sy rejects any label whatsoever.

In many ways they are opposites. Sparrow is impish, unkempt, chaotic. Sy arranges the pens on his desk so that they’re parallel and makes his bed every morning. I could compare them to Larry David and Richard Lewis on Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I don’t think Sparrow would get the reference because, yeah, no TV.

Once, at a Sun writing retreat in Big Sur, California, Sy and Sparrow were walking along one of the pristine pathways that link the Esalen Institute’s many buildings. Sparrow complained of a severe case of bunions and had to stop every third step or so to rest. Unaccustomed to walking any pace but his own, Sy snapped, “Do you really have to do this?” Sparrow, nonplussed, said, “I take pleasure in annoying everybody.” This resulted in what they claim was their only real fight, though an undercurrent of constant, loving sparring comes through, like youngsters in a dorm room riffing on what they learned that afternoon in their philosophy elective. Later Sy spotted Sparrow no longer limping along but dancing to a DJ’s set with a group of women. “Dancing!” Sy said, incredulous. You can imagine the Laurel-and-Hardy-style confrontation that followed.

“I don’t have beliefs,” Sparrow explained after he’d returned The Basement Tapes to its ragged sleeve and we’d made our way back to the kitchen table. “I have practices.”

And those practices aren’t to be interrupted, even by out-of-state visitors. “It’s time for my dental stimulation,” he announced. From what I could tell, this was something like flossing, but with a wooden device that was a cross between a toothbrush and a toothpick. I’d say he whittled it himself, but Sparrow didn’t strike me as handy in that way.

Then there’s his practice of not speaking until noon. (For this reason, Sy and I had been forbidden to show up before 12:01 PM.) And his yoga practice, which has been part of his daily life for decades. While continuing to talk to us, Sparrow did some of these yogic exercises, which involved a bedsheet, many blankets and pillows, and a stack of poetry books to hold his head at a specific angle. Sparrow joked that poetry books are perfect for this because they’re usually slim and you can micro-adjust the height of the stack. Also because “no one actually reads poetry books.”

As he performed (practiced?) his yoga, Sparrow told us about traveling to Kolkata, India, to meet his guru, P.R. Sarkar, in 1987. Having recently watched a documentary about Ram Dass’s last days, in which the spiritual teacher looks reverently at a photo of his guru, I asked what a guru is, exactly.

Sparrow likened gurus to umpires, who we know are fallible humans, but we abide by their calls nonetheless. I was sure Sy had his own definition to offer; he has been a Ram Dass acolyte and even interviewed him for The Sun. But there was no getting around the fact that his Alzheimer’s—which he has written about here—has hampered his ability to talk at length, even about things that are important to him.

His reluctance to dive into a definition finally gave the two of them the opportunity to talk earnestly about Sy’s diagnosis, and the tone shifted from convivial disagreement to the kind of conversation you end up having when you spend any length of time with Sy: serious and heartfelt and sad and unguarded yet somehow never cloying or sentimental. I wouldn’t feel quite right recounting it in detail here, but I can say we talked about the immutability of the self, the giant unknowable mystery that is God or whateveryoucallit, the efficacy (or not) of psychedelics, and how the pathways to whateveryoucallit are probably vaster than we know.

Despite the fact that I’d been the one defending the Beatles, I felt my age acutely. I was about to turn forty and had recently found out my wife is pregnant. I’ve been at The Sun for ten years but in many ways still feel like my career is just beginning, or maybe in its late-early period. And here I was with these two older—OK, old—men whose kids are grown; men whose work has been printed and read and remembered or forgotten; men whose practices have, after so many years, accreted into personas. Though my life has also been touched by illness and death and disappointment—and joy, too, to be sure, so much joy—I don’t have the wisdom these two have gathered. There was a truth to what they were saying, born of experiences I hadn’t had. So I tried to keep quiet. I tried to just listen.

Eventually Sparrow offered to take us outside so that we might see the woods and the creek behind his home. Along the way Sy and I took a brief, noncommittal look at Sparrow’s compost and “midden” piles (I had to ask my wife), but it was growing cold. The wind picked up, and the denim jacket I’d brought along was proving an increasingly asinine choice. We made our way back to Sparrow’s house, where the rental car awaited.

There was so much I still wanted to ask Sparrow about: The time he took LSD at a Grateful Dead show in 1971, experienced a “cosmic alienation,” and swore off drugs forever. Or his contention that rap music and comic books are the only good art forms. Or the hundreds (seriously!) of palindromes he’s written, including “We name ’em anew” and “Ya wrong, Norway!” Or why the only writing assignment he’s ever turned down was a review of Fiddler on the Roof.

But my traveling companion was weary, so we said our goodbyes, hugged, and got back in the car. I put my sunglasses on, even though the sky had that dull metallic overcast that only March seems to produce. There wasn’t enough reception for me to plug bougie Rhinebeck into the GPS, but I connected my phone to the Nissan’s Bluetooth and started playing the Beatles. Sy asked me to turn it up.