I think I realized it immediately, just after I felt the initial contact, and after I re-surfaced from the pool’s cold water, that no amount of time would change who my friends are.  And despite just getting embarrassed in front of a 16 year-old girl who was in on the joke, it was just fine with me. 

I just spent three days with my best friends from college.  It had been years since I first suggested we have an annual Guy’s Weekend, but it took us this long to finally see it come to fruition.  It also just happens that this weekend was only a few weeks removed from our ten year anniversary of graduating college.  Ten years, man!  And as incredulous as I am about that, being able to shoot the breeze with my good buddies is worth its weight in gold.

But it isn’t like I haven’t seen the guys in the last decade, just not as often as one would like.  I don’t live next door to any of them, or even in the same time zone anymore, but over the past few years we have seen each other here and there.  Each time I cherished the occasion, no matter how short.  But it was during my six years in the army that I missed them the most.  These were the guys that I leaned on when all the important stuff was eating at me (like when my Playstation broke or how some girl in my class laughed at me, but not in a good way, when I wore my PJs to class and she didn’t get the irony.)  I was in Alaska for most of that time, or Iraq, and I wasn’t there for Thommy’s wedding or the birth of his girl.  I wasn’t there for Chris’s boy’s birth or Brian’s two kids births either.  I made it to Omar’s wedding, Keegin’s too, but missed Keegs’ 30^th birthday bash.  But almost all of them came to my wedding last year, making it better than I could have imagined.  And knowing that each time we are around each other is void of the nit-picking and drama we served up in college is why I will never get tired of these guys.

Sure, we revel in glory day talk.  “Remember the time we…?”  “How about when Gabe stole the rice crispy treats and…?”  “I’ll never forget when Thommy put on the mask and…?”  We know it gets old.  Tony Soprano himself said that he hated those kinds of conversations because they were depressing, reminders that those days are gone.  But I don’t think it’s depressing, I think its cathartic.  Because in the hours or days we get to see each other each year we get to forget about rising gas prices, changing diapers, a shifty housing market, work woes, and being grownups.  We get to take a breath from our lives and enjoy ourselves and celebrate where we came from, and the journey each of us has taken in the last ten years.  I, more than anyone, am surprised that our group has remained this tight.  We kinda lost one of the group, but through the years reconnected with Chris and I haven’t managed to piss off anyone too much either.  But the most fun I have is when I sit and think about how different, yet similar our personal backgrounds are, and how we became friends in the first place.  We gravitated toward each other in the kind of way that makes you not regret choosing our school over a chance to go to another.  Personally, I wondered many times how different my life had been had I gone to UF or anywhere else, but I always weigh the unknown of those hypothetical thoughts against what I know to be true…I wouldn’t want to live without these guys in my life.  That knowledge always brings me back to reality.

Another fun thing I love to talk about when we are together is how different we look.  This weekend at the beach I went in the ocean for the first time really since I had hair.  Keegin and I are no longer skinny.  Chris and John refused to take their shirts off.  Omar…well Omar has been and always will be better looking than all of us.  And Thommy, well he still looks like Sloth from the Goonies, but now he knows how to play the guitar and every group needs an aspiring Cat Stevens.

What we do or where we go on any subsequent get-togethers is inconsequential.  Knowing that we can walk away from a quick weekend and have everyone say they can’t wait to do it again is what we strive for.  If one or two guys was ambivalent then it would be a bummer, but we all actually started game-planning next year.  That’s the intent (despite being too old and drunk to go out on Saturday night) of these trips each year.  And the year after that, and the year after that.  Or as long as our wives will let us.

So, with John downstairs waiting to take me to the airport, I sat in my chair trying to open a Capri Sun, only to be asked by a 16 year-old girl in a bathing suit if I could answer a question.  She wanted to know what something was out on the horizon.  I wanted to show I was helpful, so I got up to walk over to her and in a blink I was tackled into the pool by Keegin.  Thommy and Keegin had conspired with the girl and set me up for the fall.  I was mad that I was predictable.  I was mad that I didn’t see any of it coming despite thinking it was odd that a 16 year-old girl was talking to me, a bald, married man twice her age.  But I wasn’t mad that it happened, because I knew that we would never change.