No question, I was blessed to have a lot of really good friends in high school, friends who were not bound by neighborhood or even school, but by being members of the same church. It made for a very unusual bond between some kids that would normally have very little to do with each other.
Friendships come in concentric circles, of course, from the biggest group of people you know and have some level of interaction with down to that handful of people that, in my case anyway, I feel like I did something with every single day.
At the risk of leaving somebody out, if I had to boil it down to just what I'd consider my 'band of brothers,' that group included Mitchell, Keevil, Jimmy, and Clay.
Mitchell, Keevil, Jimmy and I went to the same high school. Clay didn't, but Clay had the house with the pool table, the killer stereo, the coolest car - but even if he hadn't, he'd have still been one of us.
There were others, of course: Charlie and Jeff and Kim and Brad and Art (and I'm not even going to start on some of the coolest girls a bunch of high school guys could ever get to hang with).
As tight as we were in high school, we kind of drifted apart during college. Or rather, perhaps I drifted away, because that's my personality. I'm not particularly proud of it, but I've always been one to move on. The Trophy Wife calls my personality disorder "out of sight, out of mind,'' meaning if I don't see you on a regular basis, I forget about you.
(That's not true of the Trophy Wife, let me say right now. She's never very far out of my mind - even though I don't do a very good job of making sure she realizes that.)
That's not exactly true, yet it is true that I have never done as good a job keeping up with people as I wish. Maybe none of us do. I mean, it used to be that generations of families were born, grew up, worked, married, had kids, retired, and died in the same place. I can go to a family plot where a couple hundred years worth of Melicks are buried.
But my generation - and certainly subsequent generations - didn't do that. We went out of state to go to school, moved to where we thought the better jobs were or where we just wanted to live. We were pulled along by opportunity or desire, not limited to living in one place simply because that's where we were from.
I sometimes wonder where I'll be buried when I die. My parents are buried in Atlanta, across a small path from one set of my grandparents. But I don't have any family left there. The bulk of my adult life was lived in Birmingham, but I don't expect my children to live there; in fact, I'm not even sure I'll retire there.
You're probably like that, too. We don't really have a sense of "place" when we think of "home." I will always think of myself as a Southerner, and probably a Georgian, but if my adult life has had any impact at all it has been in Alabama, even though now I'm in Mississippi and hope to have some kind of positive impact on this place.
At least I'm still in the South.
But - not surprisingly - I digress. This thing about "home" is not where I meant to ramble in this blog.
I was going to write about the time Keevil, Jimmy, Dan and I went to a tent healing service in Atlanta. It was one of those traveling revival shows that used to set up a big circus-style tent right by the old Atlanta Fairgrounds just where the Lakewood Freeway used to end in south Atlanta.
I'm not sure why we went, or whose idea it was. Even though Mitch and I were generally inseparable, I dont' think he went on this adventure. I know Jimmy went, because I remember he'd just gotten new contact lenses and these were the days when you could wear contact lens too long and they'd dry out in your eyes and terrible pain ensued. That is what happened to Jimmy that night; I remember, because the next day when I went to his house, he was in a dark room, wearing sunglasses to cover these horribly red, blood-shot eyes.
(Which also makes me wonder where our parents were back then. Obviously they were there; I just have almost no memory of the various sets of parents being around. It's like they'd make cameo appearances in the drama of our teenage lives. But it was as if Keevil's house belonged to Keevil, Jimmy's house belonged to Jimmy, Clay's house belonged to Clay ... and the parents just stayed in a closet somewhere until they were needed or simply intruded into our lives).
Anyway, the four of us drive to the 'healing service,' and ... ah, heck. I don't feel like telling the story now.
It occurs to me that I've written about my experience during an exorcism - Blessings and Demons -
and my experience in a healing service probably deserves its own full blog.
I know my kids have some very good friends from high school, some that I hope will be friends for life.
But even in saying that, I know the odds of really staying in touch are slim. I hope I'm wrong. But I recognize the reality of life.
The good news is, there are people scattered all over the country I feel confidant I could call on if needed.
I hope they realize that no matter how long it's been, I'd do the same for them.
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