What Are You Doing With Your Dash? (part one of two parts)

So it came to be that decades after graduating from college, we three came together in my city, a reunion weekend of sorts. All graduates of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, all fraternity brothers (Sig Ep).  Having tried to plan this for years, it just never happened.  Instead, it took one to commit to coming to town and the other wanting in on it, too, and joining at the last minute.

As low end quinquagenarians (50’s), we have experienced much since the days when we wore pollyester shirts, sansabelt slacks, and Frye boots.  Two of the three of us had experienced divorce.  Two of the three had lost both parents (I, the lucky one still have both of mine).  Two of the three have children, now college age.  None of us had ‘let ourselves go’ in terms of our weight, none looked old, just older.  In fact, Jeff, the gazillionth degree black belt who mountain climbs, bikes, runs and works out still- remains as lean and tough as pig iron.

I had kept up well with both of these guys since we graduated.  We were all close, then and now, even with the distances.  We found immediate comfort and familiarity in seamless fellowship within minutes of embracing at the airport despite not having seen each other for decades.  It didn’t take long for the ribbing to begin:

Me: (through the bathroom door) “Mark, does it still burn when you pee?”
Mark: “Only since your sister came to visit.”

Ya gotta love these guys.

Me, 1978

First stop right from the airport, a local Italian steak house.  The place where Warren Buffett goes for T-bones.  1950’s decor (you swear Joe Pesche is about the walk in any moment), terrific beef and a waitress with a four-pack a day, Brenda Vacarro through-a-duck-call voice who called us all, of course, “hon.”  Stop at liquor store to load up.  Let the margaritas begin!  Home to Casa Fino and talking into the night.  There was the sharing of pictures on deployed lap tops, digital photo albums of family on iphones, trip pics to this place or that place.  Followed by the what-ever-happened-to’s about old friends from the land of the Razorback so long ago.

Me, +30, 2008

It was the following morning that we had our first ah-ha moment when, after not sleeping in, we found ourselves lined up at the kitchen sink with a palm full of whatever medication we were on. Yes, we were truly at mid-life, pharmaceuticals in hand.  Coffee all around, a bagel run and laying around until late in the morning.  The talk had evolved past catching each other up to waxing about where our lives had gone.  Not what had gone wrong, just gone.

Mark was a hot-shot family lawyer to professional athletes in his part of the country making gobs of money and walked away from it all in disgust to become a paramedic in his city’s fire department where he is now a captain.  Said he grew weary of profiting from the misery of families who were splitting and fighting over money and kids.  Said one day in a grocery store a little kid was looking at him for a long time, and he became immediately distressed wondering if he had been involved in the child’s divorce. Said the redeeming moment came a few years later in the same grocery store when, in his fire department uniform, another little kid walked up to him and hugged his knees because mommy had told the child “firemen save people.”  Mark was coming off a relationship that had flamed-out but lacked the clarity of guillotine closure.  It limped, indeed, was still sort of ‘lurching’ along like a high mileage Buick in need of a ring job that still wouldn’t save it.  The wind beneath his wings these days is, literally, just that.  He is a pilot and does some commercial flying for various interests when he’s not doing firehouse stuff.

Jeff is the steady one with two wonderful, good looking kids in college, a wife he’s still got, the yard with three dogs and all the headaches of working for “the man” doing something you fairly well hate in order to provide for your family.  I think there is a hierarchy of manhood for men like Jeff who put themselves dead last to “do what a man’s gotta do.”  He keeps pushing ahead with his biking and other physical fitness endeavors.  Jeff had consolidated an amazing business savvy to have done well for himself in terms of investments and understanding of the markets and is, I believe, on the onset of a jump into something yet unknown that will allow him to professionally self actualize and bring him the professional satisfaction that he desires.

Me. Easier from the third person.
Jerry’s a guy who followed innovative, usually unconventional paths to things in his life that seemed to call him from far away places. He had his mid life crisis when he was about twenty-three being sure he didn’t want to be a worker drone for 35-plus years and pass on a wider world.  A first career in international tourism had him working and living on four continents.  A couple of languages later, he became a high school Spanish teacher.  Almost a decade ago he married a charming money-grub of a woman who proved herself to be little more than trailer trash with nicer hair and clothes (presently fleecing husband number three).  Jerry was shaken down financially of nearly ever dime he had saved to age forty and walked out on, victim of the scam known as ‘comingled property’ of which his wife entered the marriage with none.  Having recently come down out of the tree house following an acrimonious divorce, his sources of joy are his students, his two dogs, a V-star motorcycle, and a beautiful, long-legged Italian woman who recently came back into his life (see previous blog “Flying And Unexpected Award Travel,” http://mensnewsdaily.com/jerryfino/?p=64).  Let’s just say that the Italian Connection is as off-the-charts wonderful and sensuous, brilliant and talented as his ex was despicable and defective. Pay back, in Jerry’s case, is not at all a bitch. It’s pay back for the bitch.  He is now twenty years a teacher, fifteen years back in his city of origin, and he’s bored.