Day 600, 2/22/22

Remembering Tom

My friend Tom had long lanky arms that could stretch out and clock you if you got in a fist fight in the middle school cafeteria. But he was also surprisingly kind hearted, and those few times where we shared a moment, it was in recognition of our misfitedness. Two people who did not belong, and finding camaraderie in that.

We only had one conversation after high school, a social media moderated debate about politics, my politics in particular, and how he could not tolerate my vehement liberal posts. But what started at a high boil, dropped to a simmer, and a gentle kindness room temperature moment of listening to one another. I mostly stopped posting my political soap box and he stopped using social media. And that is the last I heard from him.

I take comfort in the capacity of the brain to fold time into intricate fans of undulating scenes and days and faces. One can nearly relive a lifetime in the span of a few moments. Perhaps, even when you die in your sleep, there is at least that. Regardless of what one believes in and where the soul goes, at least in those last moments, synapses might glow with uninhibited flamboyance, sashay across decades, land on something infinitesimal, and yet important for some reason. Like an afternoon spent catching grasshoppers in jars with Rob. We caught so many we didn’t know what to do with them, so we put the jars in the basement in a small enclosed room. And then the cat knocked over a jar and it broke, and we decided it was better to just leave and close the door. We went back out into the field and the sunshine until we heard Rob’s mother’s screams. She had opened the door to find a swarm of grasshoppers pouring from the basement room, and in the middle of it, their cat, eating live grasshoppers, wriggling legs dangling from its mouth. Maybe I would remember something like that. That mix of shame and embarrassment, and awe. The warmth of the sun and tickle of tall grass. To be nine or ten and not know about sex. The excitement of holding a live thing in your hand as it wiggled and jumped. We should have known better. We should have not just collected jar after jar of grasshoppers without any plan or purpose. We should not have put those glass jars on a workbench where they were vulnerable to a naughty cat. We should not have locked the naughty cat in the room with the jars of grasshoppers. But the end result was delightfully glorious, and even later, as we swept up all the broken glass and grasshopper parts, the naughty cat agreed with us.

Good night, Tom. Where ever your mind or soul goes, I hope it is someplace delightfully glorious.