In his last email to me Tom wrote that he had gotten his taxes done, although the 86-year-old admitted, “I think the damn thing is full of holes.” That was March 8, 2025. “I hope you and your family are warm, safe and well,” he added, signing off for the night.
Tom and I exchanged some 800 emails. Many were similarly mundane. And brief. Often a sentence or two. “All good here — except I downloaded the latest Mac upgrade and I am totally flummoxed.” During a weekend retreat near his home in Ithaca, New York, he reported simply, “Today I read, watched the waterfowl and had five-star quality oatmeal.” One November day he wrote, “Even with my warmest cable sweater on, I’m chilled.” A week later he said he was going to a show set in Egypt, “so should be nice and warm.” Last fall he warned me: “Keep a lookout for the red squirrels. This time of year they come knocking at our doors.”
Tom told me about his “favorite greasy spoon,” cold swims in the Finger Lakes, outings with Abby, his late-in-life romance, and the beauty and embrace of mountain and forest. He embodied the old Leatherstocking, Richard Russo, Yankee character of upstate New York. A couple of years ago — after we had talked books and revealed parts of ourselves by the literary quotes we would occasionally exchange — he took to calling me his “dear little brother of the western plains.”
When I wrote that I was driving from Indiana to Missouri to pick up a son from college, he replied, “Keep an eye on the spokes of your wagon wheels, and your powder dry.” When I said it was good having the family together again, he wrote, “Hold the fort and guard the passages,” and added, “This morning I send as much love as I can conjure to you all.” Then exclaimed in a separate email: “Families!!! Is there some way you can cut them in half and keep only the good part.”
Despite his email being “amysdad,” he provided almost no biographical information. He would joke about living on Penny Lane, recount an annoying trip to the pharmacy, update news of a grandson and offer thoughts on the cost of a baseball glove, Notre Dame football and his health. Real life in small doses. The portrait of a man in daily increments. One day his subject line read, “So remind me,” with the email text completing his sentence, the day’s entire letter, “what is normal these days.”
It was the nature of my work to make friends that I never met. As a magazine editor and writer who shared my own course through life, I corresponded with writers across the country, discussed and edited their deepest thoughts and feelings, and heard from readers wanting to express their own ideas and sentiments. Some of these writers, these correspondents, have become best friends.
Tom Bonn ’60 was just such a friend. Our email exchange began in 2017, with a letter to the editor. For years that was the extent of it — an occasional, perhaps annual email missive expressing approval or support of something he had read — until a few years ago when books became our common currency and these notes began arriving often in my inbox: “It’s a perfect afternoon outside,” he wrote one September day in 2023. “I’ll now go and look into my woods.”
He and I shared a love of nature, of wilderness, and of books about its grace and harmonies. I admired his curious and agile mind, the range of his thought. So I asked for a reading list; it was principled and classic. The Red Badge of Courage, Anna Karenina, All Quiet on the Western Front, A Separate Peace. Updike, Richard Ford, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge books, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, James Fenimore Cooper, Barry Lopez ’66, ’68M.A.
The correspondence became more frequent as we swapped recommendations and favorite passages. A keepsake: “At the highest enjoyment of timelessness,” he offered, quoting Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, “is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy and beyond the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern — to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
Tom not only noted such moments of solidarity, that sense of ecstatic oneness, but he also sought to understand it, to investigate the universe as something of a mystery to be solved. He had a fondness for the brilliant physicist Carlo Rovelli: “Between certainty and complete uncertainty there is a precious intermediate space — and it is in this intermediate space that our lives and our thoughts unfold.” He quoted Rovelli more than once.
He also pulled from Roger Rosenblatt’s Cold Moon: On Life, Love, and Responsibility: “I wander from thought to thought, having learned but three things from my long night’s Moon: I believe in life. I believe in love. I believe. We are responsible for each other.”
Despite his experience of the divine in nature — though he would never name it so — he described himself a half dozen times as a nonbeliever. “These days for confirmation of the absence of any kind of deity,” he once wrote, “I submit today’s headlines coming out of Israel and Palestine. I cite the age-old argument: How could an almighty god allow these cruelties to exist?”
We did not debate the existence of God. Our correspondence did not encourage lengthy dissertations, and I never felt obliged to change his mind — and I had no solution for his answerless question. Besides, I knew God was much on his mind, and so was confident that God was very close by. Tom would confirm this with another Rosenblatt quote: “I doubt God every day, yet I pray all the time. I pray without God. Prayer is the sound of longing. In the chapel of my longing, I pray.”
He took me along, too, on his trials during the days and weeks and months when his health was not good. A sampling of dispatches:
Sorry to report that I am not well . . .
a triad of conflicting cardiac problems. I’ve had to fire my current heart doctor whom I have known for a long time. Tomorrow, if all goes as planned, I start with a new one. In the meantime, this wandering agnostic-atheist seizes the fine Nabokov quote and stands with very weak legs among the butterflies and plants.
Suppose, just suppose, that you have not one medical bridge but several to cross and that the signage is screwed up by a team of medical experts who stand at the bridges’ crossroads and talk in different languages.
There are two major but physiologically unrelated problems with my heart that cause all of the careful weighing of procedures to fix it.
Timing seems favorable: both cardio surgeons believe that they could schedule me for the BIG intrusion within the next few weeks. One sobering projection was that following this surgery there may be one more surgery that would give promise of an even more prolonged lifespan.
My week begins, and perhaps a pale horse awaits. A doctor’s appointment, a blood test, and on Wednesday the first of the grand intrusions to my heart.
Perhaps you are wondering why you’ve not been hearing from me over the last few weeks. I’ve been hospitalized for most of this time, first with an obstructed bowel and more recently with cardiac complications.
My cardiologist believes that my heart valves are not functioning properly and therefore I am in a serious situation. Surgery apparently is not an option.
These days I’m tethered by my nose to an oxygen tank and monitored by a defibrillator on my hip. But inside or outside I’m never far from a book.
I’ve been fighting my own style of funk this morning and for no good reason.
My biggest concern right now is how to separate myself from the home health aide who has in her own way been very helpful.
I’m in a funny state. I’m in and out of a state of reality. Mixing up times and dates — not to everyone’s good. Hope things are well with the little brother of the plains.
I got no sleep last night or the previous three nights. I don’t know what I am feeling depressed about. Stay by my side, dear friend.
And this: “Just for the record: if I should ever fall out of touch with you, it might mean that something not so good has happened to me. Don’t hesitate to email Abby.”
I never needed to. He was soon talking again about his bird feeder and a lost wallet, going to soccer games, attending a classical music festival with Abby and possible travel — India, the Galapagos, a central European cruise? A Notre Dame football game next fall. A barium test and ultrasound on his aorta. I was alarmed by a “DISASTER STRIKES” subject line only to learn mice had gotten into the bird seed. He followed Notre Dame lacrosse closely and asked me to send him a national championship ball cap.
One day shortly before I retired last year, a rumpled cardboard box — big enough to hold a small cooler — was delivered to my office. The box looked like it had spent a few years in a garage. And a couple of years in the basement. And maybe some time in the attic, too. Inside, wrapped securely in wads of old crumpled newspaper, was a brass spittoon. “Brass” is an extravagant description. The shine had long departed. It was weathered and tarnished and a little encrusted, perhaps a relic lifted from the ruins of the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City, Kansas. Tom Bonn. “It became an old family treasure,” he explained, “when discovered in a Middle Eastern cave vacated by 40 thieves. Don’t count on it granting any wishes.” When I asked if he knew there was a fossilized Tootsie Roll deep inside, he said, yes, and that it was intended to give me “more to chew on” in my retirement.
It was about this time he confided, “I’ve been very lucky with wife, family, and now a love affair of almost four years. If you sealed me up and dropped me into a time capsule, I’d have a smile on my face.”
I grew accustomed to Tom expressing his love for me and to expect his nightly good wishes for a peaceful sleep as I checked my fantasy teams before turning in for the night. “Dear Kerry,” he wrote one night, “if I was a believer I’d ask you to say a prayer for me. Since I’m not, I am still looking to find souls.” Another night he asked me to give thought to God as “the infinite sustainer.” When I Googled the concept, I found that an infinite sustainer is a common little guitar gizmo. He got a kick out of his joke, then said, try God’s existence as a “sustaining element.” This put God in the company of the fundamental chemical elements necessary to sustain life — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur — and I wondered if he were moving toward a recognition of God as another essential quality for life in our universe.
I did not ask. “Dear Kerry,” he wrote soon after, “Some day we will be together and all will be explained, all will be well. Love from the Northeast.”
This past March, I ran across an untitled poem, that seemed just right for us, by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. It begins:
I don’t believe in God because I have never seen him.
If he wanted me to believe in him,
Then surely he’d come and speak to me.
He would enter by my door
Saying, “Here I am!”
Then continues:
But if God is the flowers and trees
And hills and sun and moon,
Then I believe in him,
I believe in him at every moment,
And my life is all a prayer and a mass
And a communion by way of my eyes and ears.
But if God is the flowers and the trees
And hills and sun and moon,
Then why should I call him God?
I’ll call him flowers and trees and hills and sun and moon.
Because if to my eyes he made himself
Sun and moon and flowers and trees and hills,
If he appears to me as trees and hills
And moon and sun and flowers,
Then he wants me to know him
As trees and hills and flowers and sun and moon.
And so I obey him.
(Do I know more about God than God
knows about himself?)
I obey him by living spontaneously
As a man who opens his eyes and sees,
And I call him moon and sun and flowers and hills and trees,
And I love him without thinking of him,
And I think him by seeing and hearing,
And I am with him at every moment.
A few days after sending this to Tom I heard from Abby. Tom had died. Not expected, she said, but no surprise either, given his heart ailments. I told her I was sorry. And I told her that I would now see Tom, too, in the flowers and hills and trees and sun and moon. And I do.
But still, I miss him. And I miss the companionship, the company of his emails. I find it interesting that I so badly miss someone I never met.
Kerry Temple retired as editor of this magazine in February 2024.