Last Saturday, I went and visited an old friend, whom I have known since before kindergarten. It's hard to imagine knowing anyone that long.
I think that I have been a little shy about rekindling our friendship. He's a good guy and was my best friend during a shaky adolescence. But, while we both gravitated around the same area during the 30-plus years since High School, we moved out of one another's orbit. I could get into all of the issues, but it all boils down to me not being receptive when he would reach out and him not being receptive when I did. None of this was hostile. It just was what two young, then semi-young, than middle-aged men went through separately.
There may have been a little pride involved.
I'm not sure, because we have never talked about it. Maybe that's a good topic for our next getting together.
We tried this about a month before, when I ran into him at Trader Joe's, where his wife works. I even took a phone number, which I lost.
I thought I knew where he lived, but got lost. Couldn't call. I stopped at a house that I thought was probably a neighbor's. An older man answered the door and, when I asked if he knew my friend, he said that his memory wasn't as good as it used to be.
I felt like a chump.
Then, I ran into his wife on her first day back at work since injuring herself a year or so ago. My first impulse was to turn away before she saw me, because I figured that I might be a scoundrel as far as she was concerned.
I did this, but finished my shopping, trying to compose my explanation in case she started throwing things at me, and went to my car to load my groceries and get a pen. I re-entered the store and went and found her and made arrangements to try again, writing the phone number again.
It worked out this time and we had a great reunion. We talked politics and religion and found that we both had traveled to similar Liberal Democrat, non-sectarian beliefs. We still had similar tastes in music. We were both going bald.
Actually, I am going bald. He has been there for quite awhile.
6 comments:
Good for you, man!
And also, thanks much for your recent order. It's in the Post Office's paws and should should be in yours by the end of the week.
HH
I thought about this a while ago. Every once in a while you'd mention one of your old friends and say you haven't seen them in quite a while. It seems like you let people go. You let me go for a while but I'm a persistent little booger. I'll start to complain if I haven't heard from you in a while.
For me, my old friends are the best friends. These are the people who shaped me. I don't have to edit myself when I talk to them. They get me. These are the people I'm most comfortable with. Life is kind of empty without them.
So yeah, you are a chump. Love you anyway.
If you want to slow down the balding, lose the ponytail. All that constant pulling isn't good for your follicles.
To be fair, people move. People change. New people enter your orbit.
When friends part company for a time, sometimes they hold one another in a kind of suspended animation.
Like the last time I saw your kids before I visited Santa Rosa, they were babies. Then, suddenly, they were teenagers.
And, one time, I remember you told me that I needed to get out of Riverside, not knowing that I had been to Europe twice had spent time in many parts of this country.
Or when Kieth Rohr left town to go work with Scott O on a cruise ship. We had been buddies and then he was gone. I'm not sure how any of this happens.
We have all had lives between our reunions. And that changes things.
And, even if you go home again, you can't go home again.
Ultimately, that's just the way things are.
Now, I'm in a period of reconnection. That's pretty good.
Yes, people move. Dean and I haven't lived in the same city for 25 years. Yes, people change but your best friends don't change that much. Not enough to drop them, anyway. At least that's the way it is with me.
I don't know about that suspended animation thing. If that's what it was with you and me I didn't like it. I missed you.
I don't remember the conversation where I told you to get out of Riverside. Wait, maybe I do. I think I meant you should move out of Riverside, but I don't remember why. Refresh me.
I thought about Keith the other day. I remembered when my mom died and I was here for a few weeks. You and Keith and Keith's wife (Kari?) all took me out for dinner and a movie (The Mission. Right after my mom died. Were you nuts?) Anyway, Keith had had a salad at dinner and had eaten most of it when he discovered a little green worm hidden in the lettuce. He didn't say anything, he just lifted the lettuce leaf and showed it to us. We all were giggling about the worm when Keith asked to speak to the manager. The manager was not amused. I think he thought that Keith had planted it there. It was pretty damn funny.
Keep reconnecting. I think it's good for you, especially now that you're dealing with the Mom stuff.
Can't go home again? I think that's mostly true. But hey, that's what I did! I was 2 years in San Diego, 23 years in Santa Rosa and now we've been here a year and a half. I spent half my life in Santa Rosa and made a lot of friends there. I'm happier here. If I could get Dean to move back it would be perfect. I'm glad you're here.
I just remember you had invited me up to Santa Rosa. It may have been during a summer where I traveled somewhere.
The Mission. Hey, my friends tried to get me to go see Jacob's Ladder, the movie where this guy dies in Vietnam and doesn;t realize it until the end of the movie, when his dead little boy (played by McCauley Culkin) comes down and takes him away.
I remember sitting next to Kieth. He spent some time studying the worm before we noticed and only finally said something when we asked him what he was doing.
I also remember that, when I was still working at Wards, he asked me to meet him during my lunchbreak, where he confided that he was really attracted to this girl and that he had to go back to his cruise ship job in Hawaii and that he thought he was going to marry her and that turned out to be Kari. I miss him.
I know.
He was one of the few people I've met who are just immensely likeable. Keith was fun.
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