4 posts tagged “friends”
Feeling out of sorts that my memories are not staying put in their hermetically sealed mental compartments.
How dare people live, evolve, and generally move on with their lives.
Why aren't you all where I left you?
I thought I finally had you organized, somewhat figured out, a semblance of order,
and here you are surprising me with all this growing up nonsense.
The nerve.
The gall; continuing to live after the time we knew each other.
Least you could do is not leave clues where I might stumble, unawares, upon your updated info.
Now I have to revisit/reorder how I feel about everything all over again.
I think it's going to be a good thing,
or rather it is already a good thing, and I will come to that realization eventually.
Going to need a bigger brain, and a bigger bottle of tequila.
Excuse me, I must intoxicate, inebriate, and otherwise imbibe.
Thanksgiving this year was a country smoked ham.
Soaked that bad pig in water for two days, changing it out every 6 hours or so, before oven roasting.
Fantastic flavor but we could have done better with presentation had we obtained a mandolin slicer to shave it extra thin.
The sides were yummy and the biggest hit was the day after, sour-cream-chicken-enchiladas.
Friends flew in from out of town and stayed for a week.
Plans were made for next years event. We're consolidating around a consensus for somewhere on the "redneck-Riviera", possibly a beach-house rental in Alabama. Tentatively referred to as the Alabama-Slamma' Thanksgiving bash. The concept of Thanksgiving for friends and Christmas for family is beginning to catch on in the circle and our numbers grow each year.
We've all still got some ass to kick.
Counting the Years
My mind's eye sees us young.
This group peeling layers off the great onion of life.
Jobs became careers and girlfriends turned into wives.
And I add it together and piece it apart.
I've had the same wife for nine years, today.
But I can't keep a bottle for more than a week.
Yes we've had two houses, two kids and two dogs before that.
We hold them, and fix them, and pay all their bills.
Wherever we'll go, that's where home will be at.
And in all, we've been together for eleven years, today.
But I can't keep a bottle for more than a week.
I'm an uncle and wife's an aunt for the very first time, today.
Careful maturing and aging, the form is an art.
See that's the distiller you know, me I'm just an old fart.
Friends married, bought houses and bred.
None of that kept me up nights in my bed.
But I can't keep a bottle for more than a week.
Selfish for sure, but this will be honestly selfish.
My mind says I can't be old enough to know a widow.
The bottle drains quick, looking for meaning or reason.
Some always died, sure, stretching back a long line
Those were the legends, the ghosts kept alive in their stories
And I didn't feel old knowing spouses, or parents, or uncles and aunts.
But the widow. The survivor of death of a spouse.
Knowing a widow in the group, my memory keeps us so young.
That's the one that has me feeling the aches and the bruises.
Cold and unfeeling, it's the life that hands out these titles,
Now how we live with that life tag
That's what'll define us.
Me, I can't keep a bottle for more than a week.
It's rare that news comes to me from my hometown that doesn't involve death.
It slowed for a while after I graduated college.
I was lulled into a false psychological comfort zone lately thinking that I had decades before the obits came again.
Then this past week another part of my history passed from ever being part of the future.
My mind has been working on it in the background as I've moved through the past two days.
He wasn't close in that way that family or friends are.
But we had shared history.
He was somebody I knew from before things moved fast and changed constantly.
He was from the awkward formative years, before identity and self-confidence had been forged and tested.
We hadn't crossed paths in a decade, but he wasn't one of those people that you had to work at maintaining a relationship with.
If we'd seen each other last week, even after all that time, we could have smiled and talked and brought each other current in minutes.
It was comforting knowing that he was out there.
Now, one less face to look for should I ever revisit the hometown.
One more reason to never go back.
Could be I even feel a little guilt for not being a closer friend when I had the chance.
Have I come this far by abandoning those like him that would have held me to a place I wanted to flee?
Why did I always want to get out? Why was it never enough for me?
I envy him for being able to find his place without leaving.
He was able to become one with the place that I always chaffed against.
I almost wish I could have stayed.
But then I recount what I've seen since. What I've experienced. Who I've met and been enriched by.
These are things that I would have always wondered about, but never tasted had I stayed.
This is the price paid for the travels and sights.
I will always be looking to something else that I've never seen before; always moving on and exploring, trying something new.
Still, every once in a while, I will be melancholy and somber and wish that I could have been happy staying and envious of those who were able to.
Then something will catch my eye, I'll smirk, and be awash in the sensation of learning something I didn't even know that I didn't know before.
Anyway, thanks for that first day at a new school in fifth grade Rob. I did well to know you.
