Evening, all you solstice aspirants.
Start gearing up for our celebration, people. We are mad close!
As for today, I’d like you to close your eyes and think about your friends. And to be more specific, let’s focus on those friends you don’t get to see very often. Yeah, picture each of their faces in your mind.
How long has it been, huh? A while? A few years? Years and years? Half a lifetime? Pick your favorite cliche for what best defines what tempus fugit means to you. Then double it.
How can that be that long ago? Man, that can’t be right? Jesus, it’s just not possible.
Believe me. It is.
Take this guy, for example. I won’t mention his name because I wouldn’t want him to be embarrassed. (But it’s not like he doesn’t know that’s him hanging with those two mules!) Just the same, take my word. This is somone you wish you knew.
You know that old hypothetical when they tell you you’re suddenly locked in a room with a bunch of people? Yeah, you’re sitting there with 20 or so strangers, wondering what you should do. This guy (yes, the one doing the Dr. Doolittle imitation – Texas style) never wondered. It was all but predetermined that he would be the first one to talk.
And it had nothing to do with wanting to be the center of attention, or thinking he was better or anything like that. He just knew how to put others completely at ease. And he had that gift that made you feel like you knew him. In some ways, he was as competitive as anyone I know. (Hey, if you’re going to try to make a living acting, you’d better be!) But, in the same breath, he’d have you in stitches over things that were just too outlandish not to be true.
(Note: If I’ve shared some of these memories at any point during our time together, I promise they bear repeating.)
- THINGS THAT GO KABOOM – When he was six years old, his big brothers convinced him that it would be a good idea if he put a small explosive (something akin to a mini dynamite stick) in the mailbox of an annoying neighbor. (As it turns out, his father owned a small construction company and tended to have explosives lieing around.) Being just six years old and wanting to seem cool to his brothers, of course, he did it. Imagine his surprise, though, when the explosion not only blew the entire mailbox to smithereens, it also shattered every window in that neighbor’s house. Every single one. And if that wasn’t enough, his recounting of how he and his brothers were punished is a story in itself.
- DINNER AND A MOVIE – For those of you into the film game, today’s guest of honor appeared in a dark drama called Light Sleeper back in the early 1990s. If you know the movie, that’s my man making a drug deal with Willem Dafoe in the front of a video store. That was the first time I ever really talked to him, and I remember my stomach hurting from all the fried food we ate on set and all the laughing we did.
- BABY YOU CAN DRIVE MY CAR – I like cars, especially old ones. But let’s just say I might be apprehensive about driving certain models. Enter the adult version of the kid who trashed every window of an old Cape Cod style home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. We were somewhere in New Jersey (out west by Sparta, NJ, as I remember), zooming along in an old 1973 Chevy C10 when he decides it’s time for me to drive. The once-sporty rig had a three-speed manual transmission, the kind that features the gear shifter mounted on the steering column instead of the floor. I was chicken shit to try it, but he talked me into it. And there I was cruising down a rural New Jersey highway, driving a truck with a three-on-a-tree transmission. The one and only time I’ve ever done that. Leave it to him to convince me that I should.
I have been lucky to talk to him and trade texts over time, but the bottom line is that I haven’t seen him in 30 years.
I’m working on changing that, and I would encourage you to revisit those friendships and relationships and try to do the same.
So, with old friends in mind, let’s head for Day 2.
Just follow that kid with the dynamite stick.
JFish
@Copyright 2025 by John L. Fischer