I have this group of friends, four of us, and we do life together. We are like the Sweet Magnolias, and the Steel ones. I recently proposed naming us the Melon Felons, but Heathcliff vetoed that as fast as you could say Melon Felons. She said if I was a junior high teacher I would know better. But I think it is perfect, for reasons that will be revealed later.
I really could not believe she said yes. But there I was, pulling into the driveway of Danyelle Sargent Musselman's house. Her husband, the coach, appeared on the other side of the glass door, shirtless just after a swim, and was too polite to proceed wherever he was going as he dried himself with a towel.
John Whiteaker, the rapscallion 1989 senior class president who as a joke bequeathed me all of his Ozzy Osbourne albums at our junior-senior banquet, and those in my grade who predicted a future in which I would replace Mother Teresa in Calcutta, would likely be surprised to know that I recently attended a concert featuring a band by the name of Whiskey.
A few days after the cold-blooded killing of 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, by a kid legally too young to purchase alcohol but not to buy himself a weapon capable of mass destruction, my colleague Philip Martin wrote a column called "Old News" in which he considered the brevity of our collective attention span for such atrocities. "The gunman is dead. A new outrage awaits us. It's time to move on."
I remember now the first thing Baker Kurrus and I chatted about while we waited in line for coffee that day I wrote about previously when we met at Mugs Cafe. "It's a beautiful day," I said. "So good to see the sun."