Thursday night my cell phone buzzed just as I was falling to sleep. Out of curiousity I checked the number to see if it was important (read:Matt) and didn't recognize the number. It was an out of state area code, and thought it might be someone from school, so I just went to sleep. In the morning I checked my phone again to find out that my dear friend Bob had died.
I've been thinking about Bob since Friday morning and there are so many stories to tell. One day I'll tell you the long version of how when I met him during the year I had dropped out of school, and he had just come to the city from upstate New York, I thought "Who is this gay hillbilly with the bad haircut and plaid shirt?" Then there are the stories that my kids shall never hear. Or how when I went back to college and embarrassingly lived in my own little world, where the only thing that mattered to me was the the people I was hanging out with that very minute, Bob would call me and remind me that he was my best friend and that I had a life in the city to come back to, or how when I had my first incredibly boring job right out of college Bob was a bar tender in a Japanese restaurant a few blocks away and how I used to take 2 hour lunches, and Bob would slip me free drinks. I would eat at the bar and get drunk on sake and stumble back to work. Bob used to babysit our dogs when we went on vacations and once he managed to explode our gas grill causing flames to shoot 2 stories into the air and the fire department came. When we got home we saw that the grill had melted. Once I called Bob and told him there was a dead mouse on the glue trap in my kitchen and he told me not to touch it and showed up 20 minutes later and took care of it as if I were too delicate to do it myself. There was that time when Bob assured me that the freezer burned chicken we chipped out of the back of my freezer was fine and we all ended up with food poisoning. Or how he used to strap Matt into a baby carrier, stick of bottle of expressed milk into his mouth and walk our fabulous dog and Matt for a couple of hours once a week to give me a break when Matt was an infant. Bob and his menagerie of a rabbit and one eyed bald headed cockatiel lived with us in stepford for almost a year. It was great fun for me but tough on the husband to find someone else in command of his remote control every evening when he got home from work. Then Bob ended up in LA. I only saw him twice in the last decade. But we still talked all the time. Late night drives were always a breeze because I knew I could call on Bob, since he was three hours earlier, and no matter how long I was in the car for we could find stuff to chat about. And we did. Thank goodness for unlimited minutes!
Bob always wanted to write his autobiography and I am hoping that I can get a hold of his lap top and see if he started it. It might make a good project for me. He had a crazy life. At least his version of his early life was crazy. I can vouch for the last 30 years.
I hope my dear friend Bob left all of his bad memories here on earth. I hope he is surrounded by the love he never thought he had here. Bob was loved. Maybe not by his family, but by the many friends he stuck to like glue. I know this for sure, because we all have a little circle going on on facebook. It's really regrettable that he was so caught up in what he didn't get from his parents that he never saw what the rest of the world was trying to give him.
There is a lesson in this for us all.
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