Button Sunday

Today’s button, in honor of Rhonda’s birthday, is a capture from the badger song, which I first saw thanks to a link from her. It also gives me the flimsiest segue to discuss happenings in the suburbs.

Quick disclaimer: I tease the suburbs with affection, as I, too, am their product and former resident, and I love my suburban friends, as well as envy their walk-in closets.

Saturday I had reason to go outside the Loop, and while in the ‘burbs, I thought it would be a good idea to visit Green Acres. I hadn’t checked out Lynne’s remodeling job (which took place just after mine–in other words, months ago), and it’s always fun to see her and the frenzy of canine madness that is Sparky the Little Blind Dog and Minute, the Eating Machine.

Longtime readers may remember another nocturnal visit I made to Green Acres, in which I was terrorized by a viper, thereby getting the badger song in my head for days. I wasn’t much worried this time, since I didn’t plan to be tromping around the grounds after dark.

I got there just as the sun was setting, and Lynne was outside talking to someone who was driving a pickup truck with a long trailer attached. She then joined me inside the house. The man had just finished doing yard work for someone else, and had some leftover mulch and sod. He named a price to mulch her flower beds, which was far too low, and she accepted his offer, fully intending to pay him more when the job was finished in a couple of hours. I took a look at him, was reminded of people from Lynne’s and my shared past, and so began calling him Tommy Clyde. (Inside joke, but I also want a name to call him in this post, so he can stop being “that man.”)

Hours later, we were wondering if Tommy Clyde would ever go away. Lynne had already paid him more than double what he asked (STILL a bargain), but he was still there and doing a great job. He had on a miner-type hat with a light attachment so he could see in the dark, and he was a mulching and sodding machine. As long as he could smoke, help himself to Dr. Peppers from Lynne’s mini-fridge outside, and listen to his music, he seemed content to work.

Lynne had agreed to the music as long as it wasn’t music of the varieties she doesn’t like, and it wasn’t. He had his own CD player that he plugged in next to the mini-fridge with one of those endless extension cords and carried it with him wherever he was working–which went way beyond the area they’d negotiated. The man was unstoppable. One flower bed led to another, and another. Then he decided there were areas of the yard where he could use up his extra sod. Then he kept clearing sidewalks to better to see his handiwork with his little miner hat light. At first, he did all of this to the mellow tunes of what we THINK was Kenny G. Clearly, Kenny G put Tommy Clyde in the zone, and who were we to argue?

Meanwhile, in the house, Lynne was trying to decide where to hang things in her remodeled kitchen, while I occasionally grunted and offered less input than a husband. (However, I’m not a straight guy. I wasn’t watching TV, I was playing with my camera.) And suddenly she went rigid and said, “Is that Pink Floyd?”

I tore my attention from my nifty flash attachment long enough to listen to the music. Then I said, “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“I don’t want to hear Pink Floyd,” Lynne said. “It brings up unhappy memories for me.”

“YOU?” I demanded. “It brings up unhappy memories for YOU? You LOVED Pink Floyd. It brings up unhappy memories for ME!”

You see, on what I often call the worst night of my life, Lynne unknowingly and inadvertently had set up a Pink Floyd album (yes, age police, an ALBUM) to play over and over. To this day, whenever I hear Pink Floyd, there’s a little knock of unhappiness on my skull. And because of all the circumstances, and the way this particular time in our lives impacted our friendship, which was already more than a decade old at that time, Lynne had gradually come to dislike Pink Floyd, too.

As it turned out, a song or two later, even I had to acknowledge that yes, it was Pink Fucking Floyd. I went outside to get my OWN Dr. Pepper from the mini-fridge, and Tommy Clyde popped up from behind a fence and said, “Do you know who that is?”

Since his miner light was beaming into my eyes, I felt like I was in an interrogation room and muttered, “Pink Floyd.”

“I’m going to see Roger Waters tomorrow night,” he said.

Remember that I recently posted that I’d been listening to the radio more? So I was able to say, “Yeah, I heard he was going to do some of his own work, then do Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety.”

“Yep,” Tommy Clyde said. “You oughta go.”

“Not really a Pink Floyd fan!” I said and hurried inside, as if Pink Floyd Hounds of Hell members Roger Waters and David Gilmour had finally resolved their differences long enough to nip at my heels. Which is when “Comfortably Numb” began playing, the one song I always hope never to hear again. I looked at Lynne and said, “It took only that to make this moment complete.”

She went into the living room to do something, then I heard her faintly call out, “Is that the only time in our friendship that you hated me?”

I was stunned at even the concept of hating Lynne. She has been part of my life since I was twelve years old. We’ve been through so much together, even that dark period of my life that we’d both rather forget. Sometimes we are of one mind, and sometimes we are very different. Hating her, being without her in my life, would be like hating and discarding a piece of my own soul. Never could, never would happen.

I’m not one of those people who calls someone a friend just because I’ve connected with them. Or because I like and admire them. Or have known them a long time. Other people may do friendship better than I do, but I am who I am, and it takes a long time for me to call someone a friend and mean a FRIEND in the profound sense. For me, friendship implies a sacred trust regarding things like honesty, loyalty, reliability, stability, flexibility–not to mention those big things like forgiveness, tolerance, acceptance, compassion. Once someone is my friend, maybe what I’d call a forever friend, that person would have to do a shit storm of damage to himself or herself, to people I love, or to me for me to end the friendship. I think that’s happened a grand total of three times in my life, all when I was younger and a lot less able to separate my happiness and well-being from other people’s behavior.

I quickly assured Lynne that I’ve never hated her, and as we both went about our business while Tommy Clyde mulched and sodded, I thought a lot about how even our longest-term and deepest relationships can sometimes be fragile, how we sometimes need to hear that we’re loved, the travails of our past long forgiven and remembered not for the pain, but for the way we came out on the other side of them still a part of each other’s lives. Riley was also a big part of that time in my life. When I lost him in January, I lost someone who could look back with me, both of us laughing the older and wiser laughter of people who’ve survived their youths. How I wanted to pick up the phone and call him to tell him about Tommy Clyde and Pink Floyd, and then…I called Tim, because he knows all my secrets and I knew he’d be awake and would commiserate with Lynne and me and make us laugh, which he did. No one can fill the dark space left by a lost friend, but the best friends can keep me from feeling like I’m falling into that space.

Ultimately, Tommy Clyde worked until the wee hours of Sunday morning. Lynne turned off all the lights so he’d think we went to bed, hoping he’d stop working so hard, but he had a job to do and he wasn’t going anywhere. We watched him through the windows, giggling together as we moved through dark rooms, dodging furniture and dogs and ducking if we thought he might see us. We were fourteen again. Maybe even twelve. And after Tommy Clyde finally grabbed one last Dr. Pepper for the road and drove away, we went outside with a flashlight to marvel at all he’d done.

Then I brought up that snake who terrorized me in her yard a couple of years ago, and Lynne said it was too cold for snakes. I knew if anyone would know that, it was her, so I felt safe again. I suppose I’ve always felt safe inside our friendship, and I realized that if there was ever anyone I could travel with to the dark side of the moon and know I’d make it back, it’s Lynne.