48 Hours in Denver

Dear Readers,

As promised, I am trying to write more and gain traction in the blogosphere. Thus, two updates in one month! Stop pinching yourselves! It's true!

I just returned from a quick weekend in Denver. I made the trip out to the mountain west in order to help celebrate an old friend's impending nuptials. Also known as a bachelor party, it turned out to be a reunion of sorts for old friends and also a wonderful opportunity to meet new ones. My wife asked me on the phone what we were up to on Saturday afternoon and I admitted that we were mostly napping. So it was a more restrained affair than it might have been ten years ago and yet it was a fantastic weekend.

My old friend from elementary school is getting married this summer and so this was a perfect opportunity for rekindling our old and well-worn friendships. They still feel comfortable-like sliding on your faded middle school baseball glove. One smells the leather and feels the deep, natural grooves in the mitt and is instantly transported back to a time when we all traveled around on 10-speeds and fished in the harbor and "jumped the bridge" in the summer and trudged through winter winds to the bus stop in the winter only to crowd around the massive heaters one could sit upon in early morning homeroom before the day started. The hot air would blast out of them and even though your pants felt like they'd catch on fire it felt so good to be out of the chill. Reflecting back now, I suspect we must have resembled those Japanese macaques that lounge in natural hot springs in the winter.

This weekend, we recalled our carefree days of childhood. We laughed about old practical jokes-like the time we drew black magic marker on the eyepieces of binoculars and convinced our friend to use them giving him raccoon eyes for the day. Or the time my friends planned and sent out invitations for a fictional clambake at my parent's house requesting urgent RSVP's. All harmless fun from the wispy days of youth that indelibly link us together like the higher calculus that subsumes the order of planets in their orbits. It is the experiential glue that creates an order among human connections. Every now and again we still get to pass each other by and remember when those orbits ran a little closer and linked we remain, forever a part of each-other's existence from now till kingdom come.

It makes me think of the small things in our lives that persist and that hold such beauty and that, upon reflection, show us a little of the world beyond the veil. Those things we come to know persistently in our life that offer a little transcendence even if they remind us of our mortality. There is a small ledge of rock on Red Horse Lake in Eastern Ontario. It has always been there for as long as I have been alive. I feel as if I know every crack on that rock. The lichen, green and flaky here, coppery and attached to the rock like a permanent fixture of the Laurentian granite there, the black carpenter ants that dutifully march in and out of the cracks that the bitter frost of centuries of winters have finally forced upon it, the place where I like to place my shoes and t-shirt before I jump into the cool water in the dog days of August. Even as it changes, it remains the same. Where there was once turtle grass there later came zebra muscles and now as they fade away the green and slimy moss that oozes between the toes returns to prominence but the rock is still there as it has always been from my earliest memories and as it will be long after I am but a memory floating off in the Canadian wind, echoing against the rocky shore in the haunting call of the summer loons. There is a sparkle of immortality in that place that exists, it seems at times, for me alone, as if to confirm that I was here and made a small dent in the innumerable connections that make up the strong but faintly malleable fabric of the universe. I like to think it will somehow remember my presence long after I am gone. In a strange way, its relative permanence with regards to my evanescence in the world gives me a sense of assurance, like a sturdy handhold to cling to on a steep pitch. It is the order in the chaos.

Our old friends and acquaintances, those kids I ran wild with once, put their mark on me and I upon them and because of that impression on the soul we're always going to be linked together-like sturdy human ledges of granite that I get to visit only once or twice a year now-oddly enough always together even when living our adult lives miles apart, scraping away in the murky business of the world with our heads down.

So Denver this weekend was more than 64 ounce tomahawk steaks and a magnificent brewery crawl (though it was those things). It was a moment to pick our heads up and remember about the old and worn grooves that were laid down upon our souls when we were young and the world was an astonishing mystery waiting to be explored. It was also a moment to meet new friends whom my old friends have since met and traveled along in life with. They too are wonderful people and it seems that good people have a funny way of attracting other good people into their orbits like black holes of integrity.

I'm looking forward to the wedding this summer. Once again, we will reconnect as we celebrate a wonderful milestone in my friend's life. Our orbits will once again pass by each other and it will be another homecoming to that ledge in Ontario. We'll laugh at ancient jokes. I'll brush the lichen with my hand and feel the hot sun on the granite. We'll reminisce about the glory of old days gone by. I'll dive into the lake and listen as the loons call to each-other, treading water as the sun sets a little lower and sparkles off the wavelets that lap the shoreline, forever breaking against that tough and familiar rock.