Two weeks ago, I flew down to Fort Myers, Florida to spend a couple of days with five college friends, some of whom I hadn't seen in a decade, maybe more. It hurts my heart to type this, but it'd been nineteen years since we'd graduated. Nineteen years since we'd borrowed each other's toothpaste on the way to the bathroom before class, nineteen years since we ate almost every meal together in the dining hall -- a big, smelly-footed family -- and did the stupid things that, as long as we survived them, would provide us with the stories we would sit around and laugh about nineteen years later, when we were middle-aged men at bro-downs in Florida. In the intervening years, we'd scattered across the country -- Utah, Chicago, Baltimore, Vermont, New York, Florida -- and had twelve kids between us, more than a few recessed hairlines, and the requisite number of cranky shoulders, bad backs, and surgically repaired stuff. (I had my old roommate Buck, now an accomplished orthopedic surgeon in Salt Lake City, examine my shoulder as soon as we got there. "Torn labrum," he told me. "I'll email you some PT exercises.") We were not what we used to be, but come on, who is?
Bro-Down
Bro-Down
Bro-Down
Two weeks ago, I flew down to Fort Myers, Florida to spend a couple of days with five college friends, some of whom I hadn't seen in a decade, maybe more. It hurts my heart to type this, but it'd been nineteen years since we'd graduated. Nineteen years since we'd borrowed each other's toothpaste on the way to the bathroom before class, nineteen years since we ate almost every meal together in the dining hall -- a big, smelly-footed family -- and did the stupid things that, as long as we survived them, would provide us with the stories we would sit around and laugh about nineteen years later, when we were middle-aged men at bro-downs in Florida. In the intervening years, we'd scattered across the country -- Utah, Chicago, Baltimore, Vermont, New York, Florida -- and had twelve kids between us, more than a few recessed hairlines, and the requisite number of cranky shoulders, bad backs, and surgically repaired stuff. (I had my old roommate Buck, now an accomplished orthopedic surgeon in Salt Lake City, examine my shoulder as soon as we got there. "Torn labrum," he told me. "I'll email you some PT exercises.") We were not what we used to be, but come on, who is?