A word from the heart

Two weeks ago, one of my best buddies died. Like so many these days, he lost the luck of the draw and was diagnosed with a cancer that he just couldn't beat. We all lose far to many friends and family this way, but that's just how life is.

The two of us went way back. He joined the fraternity I was in during my last year or so at college. He left when I did: I with my degree; he with a letter telling him he need not return the next semester. He had done no wrong, of course, he just didn't meet the expected standards of that august institution. No, Keith, was better than they deserved, even if they couldn't recognize that at the time. We had about a year together before our paths parted, for all the reasons you can imagine. I had to go to the military; he had to figure out what to do with his life. And though we had been as good as inseparable for those fleeting few months, parting paths know no mercy. And, as is too often, the case, we lost touch.

It wasn't but a few years later that I read in our fraternity magazine that he had joined the Chapter Celestial, our own fraternal organization's euphemism for dying, and it pained me, to say the least, but it did not surprise me. Keith was a person who had always been 100% in life. Never on the sidelines. Never noncommittal. Never half-assed. Keith was always there. I wished I would have had another chance to hook up with him, but that's how life plays out sometimes.

Just a few short year ago, however, I got a more-than-mysterious message on Facebook. It was from a Keith, and I knew it could only be my buddy Keith, for it was formulated in his own inimitable, unique way. Oh sure, I thought I was being visited from beyond, at least that was my first thought, but it was him, big as life and twice as enlightening. I had got my second chance.

It doesn't matter how long true friends are not in your life, for when you meet them again, if you're so lucky to do so, it's like you've never been away. We picked up our discussion where we had left off, discussed and debated things that were important to us, shared memories that either the one or the other had forgotten, and simply appreciated the thereness of the other.

And therein lies the danger. We get sloppy. We get careless. We get negligent. We lose sight of what's important. We quickly start taking things for granted. We humans are like that, for I don't think I'm all that different than most of us, but I wish to G-d I were. Keith, on the other hand, never let on that he ever took anything for granted. And that's one of the greatest lessons he ever taught me.

Oh yes, I was the older of the two, but that doesn't mean for a second that I didn't have anything to learn, nor that he couldn't teach me a thing or two. That's another thing Keith taught me: age means nothing; the lesson means everything.