About two weeks ago I recieved a phone call from someone I hadn't seen in well over twenty years.   We spoke for about ten minutes and concluded our conversation with the usual promises to keep in closer touch.  At one point in our lives the two of us had been nearly inseparable, but that was long ago before I married.   We maintained a close friendship for several years,but eventually the push and pull of each of our individual lives resulted in a drifting away.  He finally found happiness with a good woman and had his own family and my family was rapidly growing up.

The last time I had actually seen him was about a year after my wife passed, so that would have been in 1987.  And we have only spoken a couple times since.  My life became quite difficult, being a single parent trying to juggle that along with being in the middle of a business start up at the time.  He was happily following through on his dreams of working with the develpementally disabled.  It had been a passion of his since before we first met. 

Enough blasted history, you aren't interested in that anyway, I'm sure.   At any rate, I had explained during our conversation that I no longer drove a car and hadn't for some time, so it would be quite difficult for me to accept his invitation to spend a week or two at his home.  He has recently lost his own wife and this would be his first summer without her.

Well, this  past thursday I recieved another phone call from him and he told ( not asked ) me to be ready to leave at nine the following morning, he had arranged for me to be driven to his home some two hundred miles to the east.  I tried to make excuses but he was for some reason not hearing them.  Each time I protested that it would be quite impossible he replied by giving me some other detail about the arrangements he had made. 

This friend is by no means wealthy, having been a public sector emplyoee his entire working life.  So these arrangements had to have set him back a bit.  At last I agreed to be ready and our conversation ended with him telling me how very grateful he was that I had accepted his invitation.

I sit this afternoon at his desk, alone in his house while he spends the day with his children and grandchildren in the city.  He asked me to go along but I declined, having never met his children I am rather uncomfortable with the notion of intruding in their family time.  

So it seems that I have been taken captive for a short while, not so much by my friend but rather by the memories of days long past when one of us was rarely seen without the other being nearby.  Memories of a time when nothing would stand in the way of a fun afternoon at the lake, or the night on the town cruising for some action.  That was a better time in many ways, but I certainly wouldn't want to go back there.  My thinking is that my old friend has other ideas.  He wants to return to that brief moment in our lives where nothing else mattered.  We would be best friends forever.

I'm sorry my friend.  I can't reach back that far anymore.