Maybe everyone feels this way but the group of guys I ran with in high school were special. We were tight, maybe because we were the second graduating class in a new high school. Our senior class in 1984 was small with fewer than 130 students. Our community - Brentwood, TN - was small and bucolic, dotted with a horse farms and open land. Everyone knew each other or so it seemed in the early 1980's.
Sometimes I think what we didn't have made us closer to each other, then and now. No internet. No cell phones. No computers. No laptops. No iPads. No Instagram or SnapChat. No Xbox or Playstation, although we gathered at the Brentwood Fun Factory to play video games for a couple of years during the arcade's limited run.
Doug, Jay, David, Greg, Corley, Neil, Mike, Jabba, Jeroutek, Wass, Rip.
Every name on that list is attached to a flood of memories. Woven together, those names form the tapestry of my young life.
Over the years, of course, some of us drifted apart as we moved away, married, had families, and lived our adult lives. Others stayed in touch - particularly as the children got older - and visited or vacationed together.
Recently, after one of our group - Greg - lost his father, he and I spoke briefly at the visitation. I've known him the longest of our group, as he and his family moved to our neighborhood in 1976. Latecomers, comparatively speaking, as we had been there since 1972. He and I played baseball and football together as boys, then went to junior high school and high school together, as well.
Greg returned to town to stay for a week and to check in on his mom a couple of weeks after his dad died. He and I tried to make time to get together and it almost didn't happen. We settled on coffee on his last day in town before he left to return to Hilton Head, SC, where he lives.
Although we only spent an hour and a half together, it was time well spent. Time I needed to reconnect with Greg, talk and laugh, and reminisce a bit, too. He invited Jude and me to bring the boys to see he and his wife in Hilton Head, SC, or at his house in the mountains in North Carolina, and we're going to make time to do it.
Reconnecting seems more important, more urgent, since one of our group - David - was diagnosed earlier this year with a glioblastoma. He's not going to make it - it's hard to even write that - and in our own way, we're all thinking about what that means. To David, his family, and to all of us. It's not something any of us have faced so processing it is difficult, at least for me.
I feel guilty about missing JP playing baseball in Louisville, KY, and Joe playing baseball in Donelson this weekend. However, I wanted to get together with Doug and Mike on the Mountain, not so much to go to Bonnaroo but to spend time together.
This time last year, David was healthy and on top of the world, professionally and personally. Now, everything is different. Irrevocably altered for David, his family, and all of us.
I tend to look for the lessons in life, especially in times of adversity. What can I learn? What can I change?
The lesson here, for me, is to reconnect. Find time to be with my oldest friends. Make the effort. And that's what I'm going to do.
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