Hmmm… do you want to come over and play pool? Reflections on absent and otherwise occupied friends.

I’ve been thinking lately about how I spend my free time – my former roommate and friend Paul called from Appalachia to check in on how parenthood was going. He and his wife have a young daughter Amelia who is just a little older than Elliot and who is very into The Wiggles. I fear The Wiggles, but Paul assures me that if Elliot likes to dance as much as his daddy does (did) then he is sure to love wiggling to The Wiggles. I used to go dancing every weekend – not recently, but back in college. Often was the night when I and Paul’s future wife would dance on the lip of the stage at Toons. Paul is a specialist in cancer identification, on Valentine’s Day he sent me an image of a Basel cell in the shape of a heart.

I was at the store today shopping with Elliot, while Jes was off blowing glass, to buy ingredients for a frozen soufflé that I am serving for guests Wednesday night, we’re having a couple from my work over. I needed a pound of dried apricots and could only find them in six ounce bags. I had to call my friend BJ to confirm how many ounces are in a pound as my package options were six, twelve, or eighteen ounces – none of which added up to sixteen without going over (just like the hotdog buns, never what you need). BJ is an attorney in Springfield – with who I would often bar hop in college before dancing with Paul’s future wife at Toons. It’s fundamentally silly to call your attorney regarding issues of weights and measures; still, he did confirm the math with an air of authority and double checked himself on the web.

I have several other friend/attorneys. Jason is in Kansas City where he runs his own law firm – it used to be mostly bankruptcy, but I think that is changing. His former employer now works for him. I wrote Jason’s wedding for him a few years ago and ended up filling in as a last minute groomsman. Jason and I have been friends since Adam Davis’ History of the English Language class where we coauthored a paper on the Indo European common root of mucus, mucilage, and some other mu word I can’t recall. We had quite a few margaritas during the authoring of said paper. Margarita is not etymologically linked to the proto phoneme “mu”, though “folk” associations persist among drinking linguists. Jason has a young daughter Triton Emily, who will one day introduce Elliot to numerous challenging behaviors.

Jed is an internet properties attorney out in San Francisco. I’m not exactly whether he is an authority on “property” as in semantic/digital space or “property” as in aspects, but I assume he works in the ownership of brands, domain names, and things of that nature. He says he spends most of his time teaching other lawyers how to handle the internet related dimensions of their cases. Jed’s mother was a founder of Mother Earth News who sold out/went corporate under Disney and married a man a smidge older than Jed – who is an Alex P. Keeton type. Man in three piece suit to contrast with mom’s one hitter. Jed has no children, but his ex girlfriend did tattoo his name onto her foot, which is offspring of a certain kind.

Tyler fights crime locally, with an office in the Grand Arts district. He also has taken over his firm from the man who hired him. We see him occasionally, but as he has twin daughters who are only a little older than Elliot, he has his hands full. I got pulled over a few months back for expired plates, I had no current insurance card (though I was covered) and I had run a red light. Tyler made the trifecta vanish with only a very slight flutter from my check book. I still owe him a drink on that one, but neither of us has the time. Once upon a time we had a semi-regular card game going, but it’s been years now since we’ve had a cards night.


There are several other “lawyer boys” who make up a ring of friends who I rarely get to see of late. Ah well, such is life.