What You Can Do During A Televised Baseball Game

Look up names from my past on social media.  Find.  Do I want to reach out with a friend request or a connection request?  Job placement companies say you need 500 LinkedIn Connections, so don’t be shy.

I have looked for her before, my friend’s former wife.  Tonight I thought of her again when I read something about the power of “earthing” – walking barefoot to reset one’s physical body with the earth’s electrons – and I remembered that late June day in a friend’s house eating a nectarine and realizing that what I liked most about summer was summer fruit and … and she beat me to the words “Walking barefoot!”

But that was before we did high fives or the two-fingers-at-the-eyes-Me-and-You move so we giggled and remembered the New Wave evening at the restaurant in Chinatown before we walked across the brick alley to Madame Wong’s to see the Naughty Sweeties and the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo when we asked for another pot of tea and the waitress said, “Two dollars” and my friend’s former wife asked, “Do we get to keep the pot?”

I have not seen her or been in contact since she and my friend divorced. The last contact I remember was the phone call telling me my friend needed help  and I said what’s going on and she said,  “I’m afraid. He’s been drinking a lot,” and I said I’ll be right over thinking about my gas/cash balance and she said let me give you his new address and we didn’t have “WTF?” in those days but that’s what I felt. 

After that, after I chaperoned my friend that night through emergency room de-tox and got him checked in to a community de-tox center where he had to flush the de-tox drugs that County General had just given him down the toilet while they watched before they would let him check-in then paid the landlord at his apartment for cleaning and grabbed his clothes and guitars, I called her to bring her his stuff and she told me she had moved and didn’t want to tell me where she lived and I said, “Get a restraining order.” I don’t know if she took it as the Friend’s Advice I meant it to be, or as a threat, and that’s the last we spoke.

As a matter of fact, “Don’t be shy” is what my friend told me that day he helped me paint my picket fence.  The full advice stream went, “Don’t be shy. Don’t spare the paint. Don’t look back.”  The head maintenance guy at a job he had once had told him that. Great advice if you’re focused on today’s task with a whole list of other tasks waiting for you tomorrow, but it was My Fence and I had been sanding and prepping it for weeks and was not about to abide “Don’t look back.”

That day we used brushes and finished most of both sides of the 30 feet of pickets along the left side of the driveway as you’re pulling in, leaving only 175 feet of rails and pickets (350 if you count both sides,) so I bought a paint sprayer at HomeBase in Pico and a half sheet of quarter inch plywood and spent a week spraying that other 350 feet and cleaning nozzles and buying the other half sheet ‘cause the first one with all the nice paint patterns on it disappeared and I believe it is hanging in a private museum somewhere. 

One particularly hot day painting those pickets my 5YO brought me out an ice cold Coors Light and said, “Here, Daddy!”  It was worth  it.

(Trout homered.  My friend has been sober for 46 days as of last Saturday, my birthday.)