The friends.

If everything goes as planned, I reckon a person ort to have assembled a pretty good cast of friends by the time they reach 50 years.  Thankfully, in that regard at least, things have gone as planned.  

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The Drink: Michter’s Bourbon
This bourbon holds sort of a special place in my rotation.  All my life, I had sort of wanted to be a “bourbon person”, but it never quite clicked for me.  A few years back, however, a friend served me a Blanton’s at a party, and I thought, “now I could get used to this”.  Of course, I would find out later how much a bottle costs and how rare it is, and that calmed me down a bit.  A little later on, another friend poured me a glass of Michter’s to try, and I loved it. Almost as much as the Blanton’s.

This bourbon is like a good friend.  It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t.  It is always available, and it doesn’t care if it has been a little while since you’ve checked in. When you connect again, it is warm and comfortable and you instantly remember everything you love about it.

The Artist and The Song: Bendigo Fletcher – Buffalo Rodeo

“I’ve got 30 dollars to my name.  I am gonna make it worth a hole in the earth one day”
I wrote about Bendigo Fletcher once before.  This band from Louisville came on strong as a new favorite of mine late this year.  This song is from their newest album, Fits of Laughter, released this year.  This is a reflective song, recalling a couple moments in the past, and that fits right in with my reflective mood this week.  “And after all these civil wars are over, 
everyone can stay the weekend, over on Kentucky“…when I heard those lines, it made me think of a time down the road when we aren’t dealing with Covid (or any of the other things that cause us stress almost every day) and we can all just gather as friends and celebrate being together.

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I am immensely fond of you all, and that eleventy-one years is too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable hobbits…I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve…. There was some scattered clapping, but most of them were trying to work it out and see if it came to a compliment.

I just love how clever that is. We read The Hobbit as freshmen in high school, and I had to almost immediately follow that up by reading the Lord of the Rings.  I loved everything about those books, and in particular I loved Bilbo’s story.  I thought it was great how all of the locals thought he was kind of odd turned, even though he just sort of liked to keep to himself and cook and eat and write and smoke with his wizard friend.  I mean…what’s not to like?

While I don’t plan on pulling a disappearing act after my fiftieth birthday the way Bilbo did after his eleventy-first, I do find some common sentiment in his farewell speech.

Like most people, I have a range of friends, from Facebook-only friends, to crying and sharing dark secret friends.  Due to my Bilbo-like nature, I can let myself get awfully comfortable with staying home and searching for deeper meaning instead of getting out and spending more time around friends.

Add to that the fact that it seems like as you get older, you have work and home things to take care of and just generally more and more shit to do, and it can be tough to get all the friend time in that you’d like to.

Still, I count myself lucky to have made the kind of friends along the way that you can fall out of touch with for a bit but pick right back up with them like you’ve never missed a beat the next time you see them.

That certainly does not justify not seeing those folks half as much as I should like.  And if I were to think about what I’d like to do a better job of in my next 50 years (or…however many I have left), it would be to make the time to visit with them more than half as much as they deserve.