If I Didn't...

If I didn't...

--work as your lab partner in Chemistry
--go on a family vacation with you
--get stuck in a carpool with you
--share a hotel room with you and four others on Spring Break
--drive with you and your sister to Florida
--live on your dorm floor
--drink all your beer on successive weekends
--make you jello for your birthday
--go through a haunted house with you
--bitch about work with you over beer
--try to horn in on your torts study group
--make out with you during a drunken brawl and then pretend it never happened
--spend an entire Saturday with you in another state then never see you again
--go to your wedding because I'm friends with your mom
--act as your bridesmaid
--borrow your car to go buy beer
--paint your living room
--ask you to help me move
--work in student government with you
--have you as my human sexuality TA
--go to your house for Thanksgiving
--ride on the bus with you for junior high
--steal your Legos
--shower in your outdoor shower in an effort to reduce the hangover
--go to breakfast with you after a great party
--share an apartment with you
--know your "french" name from high school
--hang out with you at a Halloween party
--go to the Knight's Inn with you and another 20 people after prom
--drink your wine and eat your snacks
--watch "Lost" with you
--play golf with you
--go to camp with you


If I didn't do any of those things? I'm ignoring your friend request on Facebook.

A Pinch and a Nod

Valentine's Day has always been kind of a rip-off, I think. I was always the girl sending the secret admirer flower to homerooms, never getting them. I hand-made the Valentines for our class card exchange but never received any. Handmade, that is. I got them...the Scooby-Doo ones, the Strawberry Shortcake ones. But not made with paste and doileys, like the ones I slaved over for hours. Of course, this might have just been a project thought up by my mother to keep me out of her hair for a week of afternoons in February. If so, she sure was smart.

In college, I only got cards from my parents. I never got flowers. From anyone. Or grad school...I don't think. I may have gotten roses once or twice...but I cannot swear that they were for Valentine's Day. They may have been for Oops-I-slipped-and-my-penis-fell-into-someone-else Day. That holiday might not make it onto the calendar but it occurs with somewhat surprising frequency. Hard to schedule, that one is.

I can't complain about them all. I've had some sweet, thoughtful Valentine's Days over the years. But I think, on the whole, the day is overrated. I'd rather get flowers on a random Tuesday when I'm feeling low than on the federally mandated Day One Must Show Their Love. And I do. So that's nice.

This year, I'll be taking a chinchilla to a Veteran's Home to cheer up old men and women who served their country. I may get my ass pinched. And I'm okay with that.

A Story

She listened to him move around in the bathroom, wondering if he'd be okay.

The dead man had been his friend for many years. They'd spent Christmas Eves together. Super Bowl parties together. They'd worked on cars and spent idle hours on screened in back porches, discussing the relative merits of the Indians bullpen. Growing up hadn't meant growing apart for the two men.

And now, one was dead.

He came out of the bathroom, looking tired. He'd spent long hours at the hospital with the dead man's wife and their family, taking care of things she didn't have the strength or inclination to handle. The extended illness had sapped the life from his friend, even though he'd still been able to laugh at himself, even up to the last. The dead man had been known in the hospital for the bad jokes he'd been famous for even back in elementary school. But the jokes couldn't erase the black circles under the eyes, or the slumping shoulders of the man. His own wife, putting her earrings in, hoped they'd be able to make it through the day quickly so she could get him back her, back home, and get him to bed and sleep.

"Which should I wear?" he asked, showing her two ties. One was floral. His teenage daughter had given it to him for Father's Day. The other, a bit more sedate, he'd received for Christmas from his mother. It was striped and looked a bit like something a British schoolboy would have to wear a number of years before graduating. Stripes of deep purple and kelly green, with smaller but more numerous ones of orange. It wasn't a funeral tie. But it wasn't gardenias, either.

"Stripes," she said, definitively, as she put on her shoes.

* * *

They arrived at the funeral home, shook the hands of all of the family members, said hello to people they hadn't seen since high school. They circulated throughout the room, postponing the inevitable trip up to the open casket.

She worried he wouldn't be able to make it through the ceremony. She worried he'd break down. She knew she could take it if that happened but she didn't think he could.

He looked at her. Then to the front of the room. He walked to the casket and knelt.

She watched him. He seemed quiet, somber, in telling his friend goodbye.

Then his shoulders started to shake.

"Oh God," she thought to herself.

She walked up behind him slowly and gently put her hand on his shoulder. "Are you okay?" He shook under her hand. If anything, he shook harder.

"Honey," she said, kneeling down next to him. "Honey, it's okay."

She knelt. And she looked at the dead man.

"Do you see?" her husband said, and she turned to look at him. She could hear the catch in his voice before she turned. And she realized he wasn't crying.

"Do you see?" He pointed at the dead man.

He kept laughing, silently, snorting out of his nose in the way 12-year-old boys laugh in church, knowing they aren't supposed to. Tears leaked out of his eyes. Not the hot tears of sorrow. But little tears of mirth.

She looked back into the casket. She saw repeating stripes of deep purple and kelly green, with more numerous stipes of orange. And she, too, began to laugh.

They left in the middle of the service, after sitting in the back of the hall. People marveled that the friend who'd spent so much time at the hospital without so much as a tear shed was so prostrate with grief that he had to hold a handkerchief over his face the whole time, while his wife buried her face in his shoulder. They were so loud in their grief, according to the folks sitting next to them, they were actually snorting.

She thought the dead man, the eternal prankster, would approve.

A fictionalized version of a story I heard in school.