What’s a few miles - or years - among old friends
Published: July 10, 2007
Stan Ernst, 78, left his home in Nova Scotia first thing on Saturday morning.
Alone, and without a cell phone, only a promise to update his daughter when he stopped for gas, he drove through New Brunswick into Maine, where he overnighted in a motel. He set off again early on Sunday. After nearly getting lost outside of Worcester, he finally reached Zambarano Hospital in Burrillville a few minutes past noon. He’d traveled some 750 miles.
A woman in an office told him that he might find the person he sought on the second floor. But the person wasn’t there. A nurse called the operator to have him paged. Ernst, a spry man with sparkling bespectacled eyes, took a seat in the hall.
A short while later, Frank Beazley emerged from the elevator. He’d been downstairs, playing cribbage.
“Stan!” Beazley said.
“Hi, Frank!”
Ernst hugged Beazley, and Beazley cried. He’d been expecting Ernst sometime this spring — but his last letter, about a month ago, indicated only that he might arrive in “the latter part of May.”
Ernst and Beazley, who are the same age, were boyhood friends in their native Halifax, a Canadian seaport. The precise date is lost forever, but it had been at least 54 years — and perhaps 60 or more — since they last saw each other. Beazley moved to America in 1953, but by then, he’d already drifted from Ernst and their teenaged buddies who hung out in wartime Nova Scotia, when American Westerns dominated the Saturday-afternoon matinees and fish and chips was the favored Saturday supper.
“He disappeared,” Ernst said. “No one knew where he went.”
He went to America to seek his fortune, but a fall down a flight of stairs in 1967 left him a quadriplegic and, eventually, a resident of Zambarano, now a unit of the state-run Eleanor Slater Hospital. Beazley has since become Rhode Island’s foremost advocate for the disabled, and a celebrated artist and poet.
Ernst, meanwhile, spent 45 years working in a Halifax dockyard. He married and had two children, a boy and a girl — and, never suspecting his long-lost buddy was so close, periodically visited friends who lived in Pawtucket. Ernst’s wife died of Alzheimer’s a few years ago, and now, retired, he spends much of his time volunteering at a children’s hospital and in the company of the person he calls, with a wink, his “lady friend.”
Beazley returned to Halifax in 1998, to fulfill his dream of visiting his native soil before he died — and with his uncanny knack for winding up in newspapers, he was featured in a Halifax Chronicle-Herald column. Ernst read it after Beazley had returned to Rhode Island, and he wrote his old friend. Beazley wrote back. A regular correspondence ensued, but they never spoke on the phone. Ernst had it in his mind that he’d like to visit, and when he read the story of Beazley’s life, “TheGrowing Season,” published last fall in The Providence Journal, he decided it was time. Not wanting to travel in winter, he vowed to make it this spring.
“My daughter said, ‘Dad, you’re crazy to go all that way by yourself,’ but I said, ‘I’ve made him a promise. And I’m keeping it.’ ”
Beazley’s tears dried and the two set off on a tour of the hospital, Beazley’s home for 40 years. Beazley showed Ernst some of his art, which decorates walls. He introduced Ernst to hospital staff, patients and visiting family members.
“He’s from Nova Scotia,” Beazley said. “We chummed around 54 years ago.”
“My!”
Ernst warmed to the occasion. “I always say I live in the best province in the best country in the world. That’s how I feel about Nova Scotia. She’s a great place!”
The two friends went to the first floor, to the main waiting room, a darkly paneled space, where Beazley sat while Ernst went to his car. He was carrying a small package when he returned. He opened it.
“Here’s a Nova Scotia flag for you.”
“Look at that! That’s beautiful! You know something? I have a Canadian dollar which I’ll show you that I gave to my girlfriend — she was from Nova Scotia — I was engaged to be married to her …”
They fell back into memories then, as the first sun of a dreary weekend lit up the room. Yesterday, Ernst returned for a second visit before heading back north in the afternoon.
“It’s a dream,” Beazley said. “A dream come true.”
“It makes me feel wonderful that I mean that much to him,” Ernst said.
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