The Year of Friends: Cleveland Fail (29 of 90)

I’m not supposed to be writing this. It’s 10 pm on Friday night and I’m sitting in Muncie, watching The I.T. Crowd, sending intermittent and flirtatious texts to a girl, and writing.

But I’m supposed to be in Cleveland. In a big, Greek household. With my friend, her husband, their kids and her family.

Until the snow came.

The snow that mucked up our visit. One we planned months ago. Because that’s what you have to do when you get older. You plan trips months in advance.

They will move into a new house that’s being built sometime in the late Spring. Now, they are living with her parents. Which makes scheduling a bit tough.

And that doesn’t even begin to touch on my life. The next weekend I have free – or roughly free – is mid-April. Even then, I will have to find a WiFi hotzone on the Friday I drive to Cleveland so that I can deliver a lecture at Berkeley by way of UStream or Skype.

These are the events of our lives, the pull that has somehow kept us from seeing each other since 1994. Sixteen years since I’ve seen one of my best friends from college.

We are grown up now. She with a family; me slowly re-assembling my life in sobriety. Our lives are happily complicated. But it wasn’t always so.

***

Kali was one of the first people I met in Dodds Hall at Miami University in 1990. It seems like yesterday that we met. I really can’t remember my life without knowing her, which is to say that I also don’t remember how we met.

We’re both a bit loud. Definitely talkative. Things tend to happen around us. So I’m sure it was during some mixer. And I’m sure she probably walked up to whomever I was with and started talking.

She is like that. Her happiness is infectious. Even her bad moods are good. She is simply one of those people you find yourself wanting to be around. There’s not a judgmental bone in her body, really.

She just dives into life, lives it and moves forward. Always smiling. Always moving forward.

***

A semester into my college career, my drinking was out of control. For the first time (there would be two others, which includes this attempt) I found myself completely unable to function with alcohol.

There’s no sense in discussing what led me to that particular revelation, but it was clear I had a serious problem. So I quit drinking.

In college.

That meant very little going out. I rarely went to bars. I almost never went to parties. I “white knuckled” my way through college. That meant I didn’t make many lasting friendship from that time. Not because anybody cared about my not drinking. Simply because I avoided most social situations. The few that I remember attending though mostly involved Kali.

She was just one of those people who you stumble across in life with whom you click. No matter what happened or what I did, she was there.

I don’t think I ever really found a way to tell her that. I also know that if I tried, she’d tell she loved me, that I was being silly, and then move along to another topic.

Not because she would blow off the compliment. Because for her – at least with me – I think she thought, “Well, of course I would.”

As if that was no big deal.

***

But let’s not sing too many praises for my friend, Kali. There is a darker side to our friendship.

She was very good friends with my long-time college girlfriend (the one on the left; Steph is on the right). The One. Or, The One I Thought Was The One.

Actually, I blame Kali for helping me chase The One for nearly 2 1/2 years, until I finally convinced her to go out with me.

Truth be told, though, she was just being a good friend.

She tried to warn me. Of course, I wouldn’t listen. I was bound and determined that The One was going to go out with me. I set just about every ounce of pride and ego aside during the chase.

The fact that the relationship ultimately didn’t work out was largely my fault. I let my own insecurities and fears destroy what The One and I’d built up. Surely she did her part as well. Nobody’s ever completely responsible. Let’s just say I did little to hold up my end of the bargain.

Looking back, though, I learned an awful lot about love, and relationships, and taking care of somebody. Lessons that wouldn’t sink in for nearly 15 years. Because some lessons are like that. If I’m honest, though, mostly what I remember is that when The One and I did it well, it was the first time I felt like this.

Still, Kali was there the whole time. Listening to me drone on and on, endlessly, about it.

I guess in the end, it’s really not much of a dark side.

***

So The Year of Friends: Cleveland Edition is on hold this weekend. Tentatively rescheduled for sometime in April. May at the latest, before I head to Texas.

Because it’s been too long between visits. I have children and a husband to meet. And an old friend that I need to hug and thank.