Life, the Universe and Everything.

I went to a double funeral during the week.

My mate's wife passed away about a month ago. He passed away five days later. He was 92, she was 91. It wasn't really a surprise as neither had been well. I last saw him about six weeks before he died. He'd been in hospital and looked tired. The sparkle had gone from his eyes and he seemed like he'd simply had enough. Not in a dramatic sense. More that he was weary and was ready.
It wasn't a shock when I got the call, but a realisation. He was the first of the gang to leave us.

A few years ago I started going to the club once a week, hoping to meet some people, to make friends. I'd sit in the corner with a pint and a book. A bunch of people played backgammon in another corner, while a few groups of people huddled around small tables chatting and sipping their beers. One week, a guy in one of the groups told me to put the book away and come and join them. We became friends quickly, and now they are my gang, the guys I see each week for a drink at the club. There are seven of us who sit and chat and laugh. And we laugh lots. Our regular table, our regular seats. The in-jokes, the local news, restaurant reviews and so on. 

I'm the youngest, but in any group someone has to play that role. One of the guys, a year older than me, is a huge music fan as well.  I'm Beatles, he's Bowie.  And so the two of us discuss music, releases and rumours. The others are older, and we discuss life, the universe and everything.

Like all good friendship groups, ours has developed its own personality over the years. You know who will arrive first, who will tell the longest story, who will have an opinion on whatever topic comes up. The conversations wander all over the place and often end somewhere completely unexpected. My friend had his own place in the group. His own stories, opinions and observations. He had a dry wit and shared my sense of humour. We "got" each other. There were times I'd say something, and the others would nod, but he'd glance over at me and smirk. He'd throw out a line, and I'd look over to see him gazing back, wanting to see if I'd caught it. I sat at his funeral. To my right, only a few feet away, was a floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto a stone garden with a small beck running through it. For the entire ceremony, two ducks were no more than fifteen feet from me. One paddled in the beck. The other wandered over the stones, pecking around as if it had important duck business to attend to.

My eyes and mind kept returning to them. It was calming and comforting. While we sat inside reflecting on lives that had ended, the world outside was simply carrying on as normal. The circle of life, of being alive.

His seat at the club still sits vacant. It's not sacred, it's not a memorial, it's just that no one has moved into it yet. But I do find myself wondering who will be the next recruit. The next person who walks into the club looking for company and ends up being told to put their book away and join us.

Groups like ours can't stay the same forever. We've talked about this, my music friend and I. One day we'll be the elder statesmen and others will be occupying the seats. They'll never know the man who used to sit up one end, but they'll become part of the tale. They'll inherit the stories, the jokes, the restaurant reviews and the discussions about music.

And before long they'll be sharing stories of their own around the same table.

Frozen in Time.

It's ten years since I moved from Australia. My friends and I try to keep in touch, but the truth is we're in different worlds, different time-zones, and our lives are moving in different directions.  It's always great to see them when I visit, but then I get back here and we fall back into our quite irregular contact.

Last week I was thinking about people I knew before I  moved here. Not friends, as such, but people I worked with, people I saw at social events, even students. Some of them I see online.  It's great to see ex-students, for example, getting older, finding careers, getting married and having children. Not all the people I knew back then are online or in my friendship group.

I found myself wondering how an old student was getting on, and I realised that for me that person is still about 16 years old.  I've not seen or heard anything about them since I last taught them, so in my mind they haven't aged at all. They're not going to be like that now, of course, but that is how I see them.

This happens to everyone when we move out of their circle.  We preserve them in time, at the age and stage of life we knew them.  The teacher at school is still 35 and eating a packed lunch out of a paper bag, the neighbour is still listening to the Allman Brothers at high volume, the student never quite leaves school.

But we move on. We grow, evolve, change. We gather experience and learn. Misfortune occurs and our worldview alters, and sometimes our personalities. Careers advance or change, children are born, grey hair appears.  Decades pass, and my high-school friend is still a sixteen year old lover of football,  not the CEO of a tech company.

Surely there is someone in Australia who remembers me as the twenty-five year old colleague, the 40 year old student, the 50 year old teacher. They have no reason to update that picture, and I can guarantee they wouldn't even be able to imagine much of what I do these days.

Soon I will be catching up with an old friend, my best friend from High School. We last spent any real time together when I was around nineteen. Over the years we bumped into each other occasionally, and it was great to chat and laugh. He's not on social media, but we've kept in minimal contact through his wife. Now they're coming here, and we'll be catching up over dinner.  Our first proper catchup since the early 80s.

I know what he's been doing, I know where his life took him.  I have some idea of what he's doing now.  But to me there is still so much of him that is the eighteen year old friend who shared so much time with me.

I'm really looking forward to it.