My Oldman would have blown a gasket if I told him I made friends online.
“You gotta be shitting me, Moose?
You have never met these people?”
That kind of thing just didn’t make sense to him. To him, friendship was sacred ground, you had to earn your way onto it. It was gospel that a man knew the difference between an acquaintance and a true friend. He used to say, “You can get through life with just a couple dear friends. That’s all you need.”
He wouldn’t have understood this online buddy business. The truth is, I barely do either. I ask the Shepkids where they met someone and they say on Mindcrafts. If you don’t know their last name or their birthday, they don't count as friends.
That was Dad’s measuring stick.
On my 21st birthday, my Oldman gave me two heavy crystal beer mugs etched with a Yeats line:
“Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”
That quote will always rattle around in my head like a nickel bouncing in a warm Falstaff can.
I feel for these kids raised on iPhones and robbed of social skills by Covid lockdowns. We were lucky... we could walk outside and pull together enough kids for a baseball game at the park or a round of smear the queer on the high school football field.
I never told my Oldman that I tried the online dating scene. He would have come unglued. But truth is, one of the first dates I had after my Exile west of Mannheim turned into one of my dearest friends. She tried to give me her heart, but I wasn’t strong enough to hold it. So, we remained dear friends and she has been part of my foundation ever since.
Today is her birthday.
Happy birthday, Maureen.
I have been blessed with a damn good collection of friends. Many who have been better to me than I’ve been to them. Some that I once called on a rotary kitchen phone. Some I ask Siri to ring for me now. I could still recite every number I knew before 2003. After that, I’ve got to scroll my contacts like I’m looking for a lost sock.
I daydream of gathering all my people together in a field somewhere. With a keg truck, a barbecue pit, and a garage band playing Foghat really loud and off key.
We are all wearing togas and drinking panther piss beer through beer bongs, laughing till we hurt. That, to me, sounds a whole lot like heaven.
It is Wednesday already and I am making peach cobbler for the ShepKids...
...just a can of peaches, a yellow cake mix, and butter.
June is slipping out the back door, See you at the kegger in July.
