Friends: the longest four-letter-word

Good Gawd…Mother Earth & Other Pretty Girls has made it to Amazon.com, here in the U.S. and surprisingly in the U.K. as well where there are already two used copies for sale. Discovering my book was finally for sale online yesterday while sitting in the hospital waiting room waiting for my dad to get out of surgery was a little victory in a 36-hour period that didn’t hold many victories. (But one of those victories was the fact that he came through everything just fine.)

The weekend was a washout, not from rain – the weather was beautiful, likely added to the trouble – but from so much beer I lost count of how many cases were scattered about the yard and my kitchen floor. It was all fine enough Saturday morning, sitting around with Jake and Grigori, sipping coffee till my bowels hurt and my bladder exploded. Then we decided to sit outside. One beer led to another. Then Ty Paint pulled up in his little Saturn car and I could see the day might devolve into abandon and unproductivity. Kate pulled up on her motorbike and the guitar came out. And of course Eli got off work and showed up with another 12-pack of Budweiser.

But oh, so much for listing participants. We sat around the front yard on couches and office chairs and as far as I can tell no one had a care in the world. Later Ty and I walked up to the square where I promptly fell asleep on the bar for an hour and a half.

I awoke Sunday feeling washed out but okay. I had a hangover but it was the emotional kind. I realized I had finally run poor little Meadow off, not so much run her off as pushed her toward Mark. He’s younger and definitely more capable of falling in love than I am. He doesn’t play the stupid catch and release game that I am unfortunately prone to. Nearing forty I have begun to overthink my collection of years versus the years collected by someone else. When she left with him Saturday night a little of that old black magic walked out of my life.

But she came to me Sunday night. I needed her badly so I left the door unlocked. But it had all changed. No longer did she strip down and curl up beside me merging our bodies into one warm organism of comfortable sleep. We lay in bed a safe distance apart. We talked. She told me again where I had gone wrong, it was in the cedar glades when, in a moment when I had should have shown her the most kindness and tenderness, I said something more predictive than true: “I don’t see this going anywhere, I see us being very close friends.” A week hence we lay there subdued, sex verboten, only the tenderest of kisses planted on her pretty head as we stared at one another with tired, sad eyes and she told me about her ex-boyfriend.

We all know “friends” is the longest four-letter-word in the English language and sometimes it’s the ugliest. It is the ugliest when a “friend” has to watch his or her “friend” falling into the lustful, hungry arms of another who is less than “friend”. But maybe if this happens on the backside of the original lust it is more bearable. In this way a man and woman can talk sympathetically to one another about subsequent relationships, because each is a known commodity and it is forever understood that they have not been relegated to “friends” due to an unsaid lack of attraction. So all I can tell you girls is that if you like a guy and really want to be friends with him, be his lover first if so inclined, then you will find a friend for life.