Patrick - November 26

I'm late with these birthday posts. I'm late with life. I'll catch up this week - with the posts anyway.

This year we had the Thanksgiving holiday at the beach we usually go to in the summer, because it was your 50th birthday and it was what you wanted to do, and when other people started saying they'd come down too it kind of all just came together.

It worked out really well. It wasn't very warm at all but the sun was shining anyway, rather nonstop, and your kids were there and your brothers were there and to me those were the most important things, both because of this milestone birthday and because of the year it is otherwise.

I chose to go because of all the reasons I could have been anywhere else, including face down on a couch by myself (which in so many ways would have been fine this season, really, no hard feelings) you are really very important to me. And it seems like my reasoning anymore is fundamentally tied up in the question of what will I be sorry I missed the most? What will it make the most sense, looking back, to say I did? 

Showing up down south was in this case the answer to both of those questions.

And even though I wasn't excited about the seven-billion item dinner buffet on Thanksgiving and my back hurt so badly it was difficult to walk (seriously) and any number of the usual mindless complaints one can have about a day or a trip or a life, when you hugged me in the restaurant and thanked me for coming all that way for you and I said that I wouldn't have been anywhere else I knew I meant it long before I said it out loud.

I'll always be a little pissed at you for those days when you stumbled into the house at all hours and then the next day picked me up off the couch and pretended you were going to throw me down the very steep stairs in the way a youngest uncle will do, but not really. Because since then you asked me to stand up for your son 20 years ago, and you took me to a parking lot and taught me how to parallel park so I wouldn't fail my test for the third time. I've cried while I watched you graduate from college, and Rumours is still one of my favorite albums three decades after I laid on your bed and memorized the lyrics off of the record sleeve you taped to the wall. I'll never, ever forget you tearing up a little this summer over my tattoo, because we have loved and lost the same people. 

You have been my friend for a very long time and for that reason it was at the same time no big deal and also very important that I be there at the beach on your Thanksgiving birthday. I'm a fan of the easy decisions, particularly the ones that make things even clearer than they may have always been.

Comments

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[Kellee]

It sounds like you had a lovely trip, even if you were achy.

Even though I did enjoy holing up by myself and literally doing nothing beyond cooking, eating, watching movies, reading, boozing, and knitting - for 4.5 days solid - I kind of wish I had had something important to show up to this year as well. Next year. :)

And don't worry, we're all always running late. :)