The sound of rain on the roof of my car makes me miss you.
So does driving slowly down a back road just to see what we, otherwise, would have missed. So does driving in snow, though, that’s a distant memory, it's only happened once in the past decade. Merely talking about going fishing makes me think of you and time together on a river in Maine chasing big brookies or on Nantucket surf casting for blues. Walking into a musty boathouse or a dusty woodshop, tasting homemade beef jerky, and backyard tomatoes takes me right back to horsing around with you, seeing who could get the upper hand.
But it’s field-fresh corn that trumps everything! Every cornfield I pass, winter, spring, summer, or fall, I envision you, pulling over to the side of the road, walking a few rows into a field of some North Shore farm, inspecting a few ears, harvesting a few precious ones for dinner that night and maybe enough for the next night, too. Always like a big brother in a faraway place, always on the horizon, out of sight but never out of touch, always there, a distant voice, not together much the past few years. Maybe we’ll change that in the New Year, sit in your boathouse, watch the lobstermen come and go in the harbor, play some backgammon, not really say much, maybe eat a sandwich. Until then, I’ll turn off the radio in my car and listen to the rain on it’s roof.
Please go to the boathouse, Rich, and listen to the rain fall and the lobstermen call. These are the moments that build our lives!
This is a great ode to lifelong friendship. Thanks for sharing.
I have a good friend - the kind I don't remember not knowing, we have pictures of us as toddlers sitting on my parents doorstep, and pictures of us at each others weddings.. that kind of lifelong friendship.
We will go months without contact and will often just check in with a few messages by phone every so often to see how things have been. And when we get together in person, maybe once, twice or threetimes a year (if there is an occassion) we just fall into a groove like we've been hanging out non-stop.
We have our own lives now, and we respect that and just see where it takes us... but we stay in touch when we can and we appreciate it... and its the memories and associations that you reference here which remind you to pick up the phone and just...check in.