"The Shockkkkk! of Recognition!"

It's Tom Wolfe's phrase from I can't remember which of his books, but it's what I feel most keenly whenever I see a friend's name on the cover of a book.

I don't mean just somebody I met once; I mean somebody I've worked with, gone to gradualschool with, sweat bullets with, faced attackers alongside.  It doesn't happen often that I get to see their names on book covers.  Maxine Rodburg, who fished me out of the Harvard motor pool and made possible every good thing that happened to me there, published as fine a collection of short stories as the world has ever seen.  Tom Perrotta, my officemate at the Scary School, has produced a string of pearls (novels), among them Election, which was made into a film that is now a cult classic and that made Reese Witherspoon's career possible.   

And now Frank Grady has written a Preface to the Canterbury Tales.  This is the man who brought me to baseball.  In the process, he taught me--entirely logically--that being a Red Sox fan is only right.  On top of which he has now delivered, in print for all the world to see, original and intriguing comments on the 800-year-old literary masterpiece that is the cornerstone of the Western literary canon.  He's not your average guy, is Frank.

He's a tenured professor at the University of Missouri, and I have a photograph of him, taken nearly 20 years ago, in which he is wearing a Tina Turner wig.   If I didn't love him, if he weren't the agent of several of the most positive changes in my life, I would publish that photo here.  But Frank is Frank, and when he found the wig, put it on, and posed, he was helping me move for the third time that semester--and he was doing so without complaint.

Some friends you just can't thank enough, you know?