the ed report, 2023

Ed and I met 40 years ago at Life magazine, where he was a reporter and then war correspondent. I was a writer who helped shape some of his showboating stories—like the one where the Coast Guard arrested him on a boat with Haitian refugees or the one where he took the surrender of Iraqi soldiers in the desert. He wasn’t around the office much, but when he’d come back from adventures we would foregather in the Irish pub we favored, drink beer and do NYT crossword puzzles together. He was better than I was, especially at the geographical clues. He took to placing expensive sat phone calls from war zones, and I would read the clues to him and tell him how many letters the word had.

    We saw one another often through his injuries, job migrations and retirement. So I should have known something was wrong when Ed stopped doing the crossword.

   What was wrong was a cancerous brain tumor. Yesterday I saw him in a high end assisted living place instead of a dive bar. He was lying in his overheated bedroom, and I was doing the Sunday crossword in the living room. I had two squares left to fill in.

    "What's Turkish currency?" I asked. "It's blank I blank A." 

    "Lira," Ed said. Of course, he has been to Turkey and I have not.

    "Like in Italy? How come?"

    " It was the currency of Europe for a long time," he said.

 

    For years I have hosted a New Year’s Day party in honor of my daughter’s birthday, and Ed always brought mac-and-cheese based on a recipe he got from Ronald Regan’s personal chef. This year he didn’t bring it: His son brought him, though, which was the best gift ever. I have a closer relationship with his wife and kids because of this illness, but I am still losing my bestie. Cheers, babe.

 

On New Year's Day, Donna Ferrato took the portrait of Ed, and the picture she made of the two of us 25 years ago. I took the one of Donna and Ed and his son, Stephen.