Eleven years ago today, my dear friend Adria and I were making our way home from New York City after a vacation that began as the trip of a lifetime between three college friends and ended with us watching our friend Adam die on the floor of the Rite Aid pharmacy we stopped by for Powerades on our way to walk the Brooklyn Bridge. 

The days and weeks after Adam’s death were a fog – a  slurry of story, memory, music, dream. So many of us clumsily, lovingly articulated our shared connections with Adam over phone calls, texts, social media. Every one of us felt special to have known him – to have held some place in his heart. He was just one of those people who made you feel really damn lucky that he smiled at you – and luckier still if he wrote you some words…

A poem on the back of a Portside menu. 

An inscription on the inside cover of a gifted Robert Graves book. 

A song lyric on a Snowbound receipt he pulled out of the pocket of his cutoff shorts and smoothed out on the weathered picnic table at the Lower Harbor. 

He staked his claim on each of our hearts one scrawling line of cursive at a time.

Eleven years is a long time, or maybe a short time. I’m not sure anymore. In so many ways I still feel like the 32-year-old “girl” who danced on the big keyboard with dear friends at FAO Schwarz. The girl who drank greedy gulps of double IPA on the Stanton Island Ferry on a 92 degree Manhattan day. The girl who stood knee-deep in the waters of the Atlantic at Coney Island and raised her arms to the sea sprawling before her, waves slapping against her knees and splashing her thighs beneath her turquoise sundress. 

In other ways, I feel like a middle-aged woman – lines slowly deepening across my forehead, the silver crown at my hairline and temples brightening every day. I take magnesium for insomnia and Omega-3 for dry eyes. I own a business and did my own taxes last year. I have a bird identification app on my phone. 

I’m growing older, and I’m not sad about it, truly. But it feels a little strange moving on to the next era of life without one of my dearest friends who should have celebrated his 44th birthday just a few months after me this year. 

***

The last three years of my life have been brutally hard. I’ve grieved and sobbed and stared at the ceiling like it’s my job more nights than I could count. I ended an 18-year marriage. I let go of a religious paradigm that was all wrong for me. I went back to school and launched a new career as a massage therapist. I placed my homeschooled kids in public school. I asked all the questions and released myself from having any of the answers. 

I lost people. 

I found people. 

And all the while, behind the curtain, behind the main stage, there was Adam. 

Adam, who saw me. 

Adam, who accepted me. 

Adam, who wrote me a poem called No More Hot Dogs on one of those smoothed-out pocket scraps.

Adam, who made me feel ridiculously lucky to have a true friend in this confusing world.

***

This past weekend, my middle son and his best friend both turned fifteen. My new partner and I hosted a campout/birthday party for them and invited several of their buddies. These boys have a little garage band – they call themselves Forensic. They’ve been at it for a few months now, figuring out chord progressions and syncopated rhythms and how to toss their hair across their foreheads when they get to the angsty choruses. 

I told the boys I’d like to hire their band to play their first gig on our back deck on Saturday night. They were stoked. They practiced tirelessly so they could pull off five songs for an audience of Gen-X’ers and a couple Boomer grandparents. When they were warming up before the gig, the volume was absolutely cranked. I knew all the neighbors on my Dead End street could hear them loud and clear – hell, a decent pocket of the county could hear them. I texted all my neighbors to apologetically explain what was going on, and one of my faves wrote back, “Don’t worry about bothering me. Let the kids have a garage band in this brutal world.”

***

The boys took the stage by running out of the creaky clamshell door that emerges into the backyard from the basement. They stormed the deck and tore into a perfectly angsty, broody, charmingly-pitchy rendition of Say it Ain’t So by Weezer. The whole thing was exactly what it needed to be. A few proud parents woooooo-ing from the lawn and stuffing bills into a makeshift tip jar. One of their grandmas smiling approvingly from beneath her straw visor. The breeze from the river corridor rippling every boy’s hair.

And every one of them was ALIVE. They stood on the brink of something – of everything. 

I thought of Adam. Of Goob. The anniversary of his death, or maybe his life – the final Saturday he raged it with a couple of his best friends. I saw him holding his guitar all angsty and brooding – June breeze blowing his hair just right. I thought of all the stories he told and the poems he wrote and the songs he shouted straight into our hearts. 

I knew he would have loved this moment. This scene. This rag-tag group of sunburnt boys showing off their new garage band – one of the first marks they’d make on this brutal world. The last streams of sunlight from behind the popples falling across their foreheads. Notes and measures clicking into place. 

Lyric

Rhyme

Belonging

Friendship

Possibility

Youth

It was all there, and it was all theirs – just as it once was ours.