my friend john

i haven't exactly been great at the new year's goal of updating this once a week.  i could come up with a flurry of excuses but excuses are a dime a dozen and don't quote me the price if i haven't got the time.  am i right?

i'm in a transitional period in life right now.  the last couple months have been pretty miserable.  the mind has the incredible power to forget how difficult and painful change can be.  for that i am thankful but at the same time whenever i go through a growth period i find myself wondering what this mess is all about.

and then i have days like today when i realize i'm just going through a shake up and getting a new skin and i settle back in.  i am very grateful for the people who have stuck through the last couple months with me, whether by choice or because they're forced to.  i'm glad to have people who allow me to be sad and intentionally make lousy life choices and then cheer me on when i on occasion decide to be nice.

which brings me to the story of my friend john.  john works with me at the timeshare.  tomorrow he will be turning 72.  today i asked him what year he was born because i was too tired to do math.  1943, he said.  in london while the bombing was going on.  and then they moved to south africa because his father knew the economy would be too big of a mess after the war if they stayed.  when he was around 12 they returned to london but left when his mother got rheumatism.  that's when they made the move to australia.  he was around 14.  they started on one side of the country but after a few months his father decided to move the family across the country to just south of sydney.  he remembers sitting at the back of the train with his father and looking out over the 100 of miles of straight track and seeing masses of kangaroos running away from the train as they traveled across the outback.

do you know about the animals in australia, he asked me today.  not really, i told him.  and he told me about snakes that live in the water and can kill you.  spiders that set traps and pull beetles down the trap door.  a lizard that will bite you and every year for the rest of your life the mark will return for a couple weeks for no reason at all.  and the platypus.  with it's weird face.  and it's weird feet.  and it's weird desire to live in a house made of sticks on the water.

they had to survive, so they got weird, he said.

they had to survive, so they got weird.  one of life's great truths.  we have to survive, so we get weird.  we make it work. we adapt, we change, we become something different and new.  something we never dreamed of being.  and we build our house of sticks on the water with our weird faces and feet.

a couple weeks ago john said we were going to go out and tell each other jokes.  this invitation has been the highlight of my month and i hope it actually happens and soon.  but i'm definitely going to need to come up with a list of good jokes before then.  i wouldn't want to let him down.  it is the moments like that, when i realize i've made a real connection with someone, that i feel that maybe things aren't really as pointless as they sometimes seem.

so here's to change and to growing and to getting weird.