Motus Mentis

It’s with terrible sorrow that I must report the death of one of my oldest and closest friends, Peter H. Kranzler, who, I learned today, died on February 15th in Petaluma, California, where he had lived for many years. We had not been in touch for a year or more; my understanding is that he succumbed to an aggressive form of cancer (which seems awfully common these days).

I had known Peter since our adolescence in Montgomery Township, New Jersey, just north of Princeton. We met in about 1969 or so at Montgomery High School, and became fast friends right away. We went our own ways after high school, but kept in touch often by phone and letter. (Peter ended up moving to California decades ago; he loved it for both its meteorological and political climate.) He became a financial planner in the greater Bay Area, and did very well for himself.

Peter had one child — a daughter, Julia — from his first marriage. After that marriage dissolved he fell in love again, a union which, as far as I know, lasted the rest of his life.

It was Peter who introduced me to the woman I would later marry, the lovely Nina. He was living and working in Martha’s Vineyard for the summer of 1975, and on Independence Day weekend I went up to visit him at the house he was sharing with a few other young people. (I was nineteen years old.) When I knocked on the door it was opened by a vision of female beauty with a stunning figure, long brown hair, and deep dark eyes. That was Nina, who was renting one of the other rooms in the house. (To keep a long story short, we hit it off very well indeed, and are still together, fifty-one years later.)

Peter was a kind, intelligent, and gentle soul, with a keen and playful mind, and a sparkling sense of humor. He was also one of the most unrelentingly positive and optimistic people I have ever known: unlike saturnine types like me, always finding things to grump and worry about, he was a truly blithe spirit, with an almost Whitmanesque ability always to enjoy simply being alive. He was the sort that William James referred to as the “once-born”: those who never have to bounce off the bottom to appreciate the gift of life.

We never did see eye to eye politically, and there were times when this caused some strain between us. Looking back now in sadness, I have to say this was almost entirely my own fault — because for Peter, our disagreements were never more, I think, than a game we played, whereas I came gradually to find them painful and fatiguing — and that strain led to us falling out a bit for a while. Our friendship was too old, too deep, and too multilayered, though, to be ruined by it, and we continued to keep in touch with undiminished amity (though less and less frequently as the years went on).

Longtime readers of this blog, if any are still around, will remember Peter well: he commented here for many years under the sobriquet “The One Eyed Man” (from the old saying that “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”). We had some volcanic disagreements in the comment-threads as things fell apart in America and my writing became more political; eventually, by mutual agreement, we ceased. How I wish we could have one more.

Farewell, my old, dear friend. I’m so very sorry I never got to say goodbye to you. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.