ON THE DAYS THAT I FORGET

I love you guys.

I have four friends, companions since childhood. I consider four a good number, a winning Lotto ticket, given that nearly nothing fabricated today lasts until tomorrow, certainly not sixty years. Most of the lifetime warranty guys have cashed their last, hard-earned goodnight, and recycled plastic now play-acts as steel, spines of jelly everywhere. It’s a larcenous shame, our disrespect for durability.

We are undoubtedly aging, my friends and I, but none are yearning for dirt. No quit, ever, in these guys. They are mule stubborn, even on the days that I forget.

When I speak with them, I am shaken awake by the sound of their voices. Immediately, I am tossing baseballs at the Little League field. At the barber shop sucking an orange lollipop, the place reeking of Vitalis and talc. Celebrating the music of Chuck Taylor’s squeaking on a shining gym floor, the light above crowning our short-lived glory. Chugging cold beer on a snow-packed country road. At a funeral studying all the drawn faces.. Hushed at church. Across a crowded bar. In the back seat of a car, doing 80, with the windows down and Cat Scratch Fever clawing through the windshield to accelerate our escape. Talking about girls, all the girls, and wondering if they are talking about us. Inside the Post Office, the lingering smell of paper, ink, and glue (we licked stamps and envelopes in those days), the dark stone floor solidly comforting, always cool on a humid July afternoon. It felt like church without the genuflecting.

Divorce, death, self-immolation and rebirth, blood hitting the tile, ripped open, and welcoming words become sutures, and a hand up to help get your ass off the deck, these fellas, and I. Upright. We’ve done that.

I have intermittent ashen days now and feel heavy under even heavier clouds. So many are gone, irreplaceable, and I know we only get one of some and too many of others, and it takes occurrence and loss and understanding borne of a blazing crucible to distinguish the difference. The price for wisdom is pain.

But still, my old friends remain, reminding me that time is timeless.

They and I, still standing.

I couldn't have done it without them.

Even on the days that I forget.