Hello

I haven’t been writing much lately, or at least what I have been writing has remained for the most part unfinished and fragmented. These days I feel like I’m telling the same stories over and over, and quite frankly I’m starting to get bored listening to myself write.

The park has been pretty quiet lately anyway, all the neighbors getting their gardens ready for winter and putting their pumpkin decorations out. Things have just been slowly drifting along, waiting for fall to turn into winter.

Last night I received an email from Jeff Abshire, a friend from so long ago that it pains me to think that it’s my own life that’s past by. I don’t usually name names here on this site, mostly out of courtesy to the people in my life that I want to write about. But when I got the email from Jeff, I had to get out an old yearbook to make sure I had an accurate picture. Last night, Sweetie and I sat at the kitchen table going through those books and out popped all these names. Names like Brett Wing and his brother Barry, Reed Garner, Andrew Harrison, Paul Neary, Alan Rothenbeucher, Andrew Thatcher, Carston Groenwald, Denien Craft, Margret Linguri, Don Mahoney, Eileen Burk, Tim Walsh, Danny Cumberland, Chris Doestling, Hans Becker, Michael Cohen, Chris Zahn, Gordon Murphy.

Ninth grade I played in a band called Sorcerer, to this day, one of my most painfully favorite band names. As a band we were ok, just a bunch of fourteen year olds trying to write the kinds of songs we were listening to. Unfortunately what we listened to was a lot of Styx and Kansas, Van Halen, and Rush – but fortunately we also listened to a lot of Ian Drury and the Bockheads, the Stranglers, Tom Petty and the Heart Breakers, and The Sex Pistols. What’s funny and beautiful and horrifying is that the songs we wrote, the way we played sounded like all of that – all put through the blender of a fourteen-year-olds head.

This week I’m using names like a lighthouse beacon.

Me, I’m easy to find…type in my name into any search engine on the web and after a little searching I pop right up. These people…some of these people are ghosts.

Not all people like to remember being fourteen. Myself, I enjoy the bittersweetness of it all -- Sweetie would probably say a little too much for my own good, as I tend to wallow -- but I can’t help myself.

We were just a small island of friends living half way around the world, twenty miles outside of Frankfurt, Germany. Living in a country that wasn’t ours at that awkward age between being a kid and being all grown up.

Those days I used to be so good at goodbyes, but I’m really not that good anymore.

These days I’m better at hellos.

Hi Jeff…thanks for writing…

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