Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Resolute. The derivation of “resolution,” no? Should probably pick one that you can be the other about. Just saying.

2) Bowls. Is it just me or has New Year’s Day become something, I dunno, less? If you are of a certain age you remember January 1st as the day when you watched college football, even if you hated college football, because pretty much every family planned their day around exactly 4 games: Sugar, then Cotton, then Rose, then Orange Bowl. In that order. Meals, family visits, pretty much everything revolved around who was playing when, depending on who mattered the most to the family member driving the schedule. Remember?

It all started to fall apart with the Gator Bowl. I know…you want to blame the Fiesta Bowl, but before Tostitos or Doritos of whatevero’s got involved it was the Gator Bowl that crashed the party. We now have, what, 35 Bowl games, and even when the B(S)CS championship Game isn’t held in a traditional game we STIILL don’t have all 4 on 1/1. Can anyone tell my why the Sugar Bowl game is on a Tuesday? For real?

The “good old days” weren’t always good (props to Billy Joel), but in this instance, BCS or no BCS, New Year’s Day is just a cheap imitation of the holiday of my youth.

3) 21 months. It’s rather sad chez bingo today. My friend Ken will pass very shortly. Diagnosed 21 months ago with a disease that has a 95% mortality he will succumb at least 12 months later than predicted, but he like all the others will succumb. His passing at age 45 is quite sad, and I could (and probably will elsewhere) mine this for literally thousands of words, but I’d like to share just one little part of this with you, my Crossfit friends.

It took a fatal illness for two busy docs to make the time to forge a friendship that deserved to be. We have so very much in common and are so very comfortable in the company of one another. The small difference in our ages and family life stages meant that the friendship would not occur spontaneously, or organically, even though by rights it really should have. Nope, it took the specter of looming demise to make the two of us look at our lives, our days, our schedules and obligations and declare that we would be friends. For 21 months as it turned out.

Do I feel cheated somehow? Having made this decision to be a friend, carve out time I didn’t think I had to be everything a friend should be? I’m sad, but no, I don’t feel cheated or gypped somehow. How could I? A friend is such a precious and rare thing that even 21 months of real friendship is something to be cherished, its wonder and its splendor worth every bit of the pain and the emptiness of its loss.

Here’s the rub, a lesson learned time and again since that first time my Dad, Grampbingo first warned me: we get very, very few real friendships in this life. Very few people on whom we can depend, who can depend on us. Precious few who we are willing to make the time necessary to nurture the friendship. So few with whom everything is shared and score is never kept. So few.

For 21 months I had one more.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at January 2, 2011 8:37 AM

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