Hugh Hollowell

I know I have been a bit morose of late, and I want to apologize. I have a lot going on right now and I am trying to process it all. Also, I have the “Big News” I mentioned in the Friends post that I am still dealing with. (By the way, sometime early next week I will be able to let you all in on it, so quit pestering me, already).

This morning, I had to close another door, and for me that is always hard. I have so much to do and my ADD is just raging, so I am frozen (Never Good).  Those of you who are around, just deal with me and put up with me the best you can and I promise next week it will all make sense.

I have big, no, huge things going on right now. And I very much want to tell you about it.

The problem is, there are about 10 people who I desperately want to tell about it face to face. I do not want them to read about it on my blog, hear it from a third party, see it on CNN (just kidding… or am I?). And since all of them do not know yet, I can not fill you in yet either,  constant reader.

(Those of you who do know, please do NOT reveal anything in the comments. Yes, Sandie, this means you too…)

This got me to thinking about friendship in general. When you are younger, your friends were the people you hung around with, that you stood next to at recess, that you passed notes to in class.  They were in your life every day.

Now, back to those 10 people… 3 of them are out of state, 2 of them I speak (not counting email, Christmas cards and such) to about 4 times a year, 1 of them I have met face to face only 3 times (actually on 3 separate occasions,  but multiple times each occasion).

Yet, these folks are my people, my eclectic collection of friends, cronies and partners in crime. We laugh together, share our tragedies, triumphs, victories and shortcomings with each other. We all are, in the truest sense of the word, friends.

Some of them are women, but none of them were ever girlfriends. We all usually end our conversations with ‘I love you” or something similar and think nothing of it. We have watched the ups and downs of lost loves, poor mate choices, deaths and births. The longest I have known one of this group is nearly 31 years, the shortest about 2 years. We all come from different backgrounds, faiths and political systems. When you actually think about it, the only thing we all have in common is that we all have nothing in common.

I love them all.  As Yeats said, “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends/And say my glory was I had such friends“.

I suppose we have all had the experience of a door irrevocably closing, such as…

• An old lover marries
• Someone you love dies before you tell them how you feel
• The restaurant you carried your first date to closes
• They tear down the house you grew up in

Yesterday, a door closed for me. In all honesty, it was already closed but I did not have to face it until yesterday. And I was the one who pushed it shut.

I hate that sound.

I know a guy, let’s call him Steve (his name is sooo not Steve, but work with me here, OK?). Actually, to be more accurate, I knew him about 20 years ago.

We were inseparable, Steve and I were. We got in trouble together, we chased girls together, we almost got thrown in jail together. Very good times, indeed. When it came time to graduate High School, I went in the Marines, he went to College.

He got married, had kids, had a divorce, got remarried, had more kids, changed jobs about 4 times, has a huge house, a country club membership and probably an ulcer for all I know. The reason I know all this is not because we have kept in touch, for we have not. I had not heard a word from him in the last 20 years. However, as you certainly know by now, gentle reader, I have been feeling a bit nostalgic of late and so I looked him up.

Man, it was good talking to old Steve. He howled (literally howled) when I called him. We laughed, we joked, talked about old times, played the who-is-where-now game, got caught up on marriages, divorces, jobs, kids and so on… and then the phone went silent. We had run out of things to talk about. It was almost like talking to a complete stranger.

It turns out we have zero in common any more. We are miles apart politically, we have different religions, he is very yuppie and I am very… NOT. We hemmed and hawed for about another 10 minutes, promised to talk more often, invited each other to our respective houses and got off the phone, each of us secretly relieved.

You see, we no longer had any context to place the friendship in. The structure was still there, but the things that had made it all work were gone. Our lives had changed, and we had changed, but the friendship was static and as out of place in this new world as a 2007 Corvette in a classic car show.

Luckily, this does not always happen. I have found many friends over the last few months and for the most part, the comfort is still there, the structure is sound and both sides are working to hang new memories on the old framework.

As you may have been able to tell, I have been thinking a lot about the past lately, an indulgence I rarely grant myself. I am more future based; I always believed you could do nothing about the past, so why think about it?

I turned 35 last month. I woke up and realized I was 35 and chunkier than I would like, balder than I would like, more alone than I would like… 2 years older than Jesus when he died, two years younger than Martin Luther King Jr. was when he died and I feel like I have accomplished Jack Sh*t.

Perhaps it is normal to be introspective at this point in my life… how did I get here, what about the choices I have made. So I turn 35, all my old friends come out of the woodwork and now my ADD is working overtime with all these memories I had subliminated in my efforts to get on with the business of being successful.

Remembering stuff like…

• The cute girl who sent me a note my first day of class in 5th Grade (Coach Suddoth’s (sp?) Homeroom). It was my first day in public school, I think I was the only kid in the class that had not gone to school there the year before so I was the object of much staring and whispering. She (who shall remain nameless, but I know she reads this blog) smiled at me, sent me a note asking my name, being nice to me when no one else was.
• In the height of the 1st Gulf War, impersonating an officer and invading the Navy barracks with my friend Dennis… We were lucky we were not shot.
• Wondering if Joe was gay (and now wondering why it mattered).
• My Mom driving me to the 16th birthday party of the girl mentioned above (and then she stayed!)
• If Joey ever knew, and if he did, did he forgive me?
• Memorizing all the DI lines from Full Metal Jacket.
• The smell of grass after you cut it
• The note I got from my Dad while in Boot Camp telling me he was proud of me.
• Sharpening my pencil in Mrs. Dye’s class (long story, and I would blush if I had to write the whole thing out).
• Learning the names of all the NFL teams from Heath’s lunch box.
• Quoting Shakespeare in Physics class… Reggie laughing.
• Being painfully shy.
• The horrible pain I felt when I realized she did not care about me at all, I was just a way to go to the prom.
• Learning to tie my Sebagos the cool way.
• Pegging my Jeans.
• Parachute Pants.
• Laura wondering about bleach.
• Marithé François Girbaud. I thought I was so cool.
• Getting a black eye at the homecoming game.
• Being maybe 8 years old, making mudpies with my friend Denise, who later changed her name.
• Woody B. Hard
• The African country of Djbutie.
• Coach Taylor’s Rules.
• The day I realized that my best female friend was attractive (I had honestly never noticed it before).

sighhh…

Sometimes, it all seems almost like a movie I watched… not real at all.

John Lennon said that life is what happens while we make other plans. I have surely felt that this week.

Over the last week, I have been in touch with 4 old friends, none of whom I have talked to or heard anything from in over 10 years. As I have talked and emailed with them, the problem of how to sum up 10-15 years of your life in a few short sentences comes up.

Well, I have to talk about the marriage and how it ended, no way around that. And several of them knew me when I was entertaining ideas of entering the clergy, so I have to explain that.

Over the last 10 years, I have moved from an upwardly mobile yuppie wannabe to an urban beat bohemian business person (if you think that is confusing to think about, you should try living like that!). While my faith means much more to me now than it ever did, I have moved far, far away from proselytizing. I shudder at the folks I turned off with my early zeal. Now, I am more worried about how I live than my spiritual “body count”.

I want to tell them how I have never had kids, but there was that miscarriage; how I cried and how I have always felt a bit cheated. I want to tell them how I almost married another lady that had 3 kids… how much I loved those kids, how much they meant to me and how it almost killed me to give up on that relationship.

More than anything, it is hard to communicate just who you are now, and why that is better or worse than who you were when they knew you. Then you find out they are having the same problem explaining who they are now to you.