Two Guys

It’s a fine summer’s evening for your annual wine tasting shindig; home-grown fruits in home-made fermentations. We stay up half the night washing down the terrible wine with weak beer doing what guys do best, bull**iting and philosophizing solving the world’s problems as wives relax and children play all around. Being twice your age I figure my job is to offer some words of wisdom. And I seem to do okay until the conversation settles past the general woes of this world and mankind to the woes of us - two guys - sitting under the stars, the women and children all long gone to bed, and all I can offer is the barest hint of what I have done and still do as I stumble along coping as best I can. Eventually we call it quits, past feeling tipsy and tired, to real and raw at rock bottom. Walking home in the moonless night I think about the weight we all and each carry, a private weight no one else can share or really ever know. It’s clear I haven’t been able to impart any advice let alone wisdom, and the fragileness of the moment and the challenges you face weigh on me as if my own. In the dark considering how everyone everywhere carries their own grief, dealing with it at whatever stage and intensity, I think we did about all two guys can ever do talk and listen, find and open our hearts, and know in our bones we’re not alone. (for Patrick - 9/4/23)