Distraction

"And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again

The Sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death"

-Pink Floyd, Time

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life."

-Socrates

Peg's been out the door for an hour plus forty. I've accomplished little, sipping coffee over a breakfast of yogurt and granola, reading my usual morning lineup: Drudge, LGM, Heather Cox Richardson, the NYT headlines. All that burns through one's morning, without any upside except building a little smug, self-righteous anger at this politically stupid moment.

I also scrolled through the Andover and Nashua area real estate top picks from our realtor over there, a nice, bright young man who continues to hold out hope that the two lost Floridians will find their way home to a place they've never lived.

At some point I need to get off my ass and start working on this semester's offerings for my LLM program. It's only three units this time around, after surviving a bruising five unit spring in the midst of starting a new firm, trying cases, and monitoring the end of the world through the aforementioned news sources. My excuse for now is that the books haven't arrived yet, but time marches on and finals are in August. I need to get after it.

I figured today I'd write about the Russians losing a third of their strategic bomber force a couple days ago in a sneak attack, and maybe remembering fondly the IL-76 the Iraqis left out on the tarmac at the airfield a few miles from Tikrit, hoping someone would be dumb enough to attempt to strafe it until one of my colleagues identified himself as that dumb person and almost got himself and his wingman vaporized in the predictable ambush.

There. I guess I told the story.

But instead I find myself thinking of what a shitty friend I've been, maybe a shitty father as well, because I've always been immersed in work and work-related worry. I used to kid in my youth that I needed happy hour because it marked a hard-stop on my work calendar, the moment I could do no more thinking work because my thinking would become a little clouded. I needed that, or I'd have sat hunched over the pile of legal problems of the day from sunup to bedtime.

Work is necessary of course, and even salutary to the extent it gives meaning and a sense of accomplishment besides just paying the bills. But life in the law is consuming, just like reading all the online doom in the morning swallows the early morning. And for what?

Meanwhile, meet my old best friend Tim.

The very first person in the Air Force ROTC cadet corps to speak to me was Timothy Wayne Newman, an imposing 6-foot-2 Japanese guy in a rigidly starched summer uniform blouse and highly shined shoes. He noted that I, on my first day as a cadet a semester late in the academic year, hadn't yet broken the code on uniform preparation:

"You just took that shirt out of the package and put it on, didn't you?"

Yes, yes in fact I had, the vertical folds still visible running down either side of my chest and back.

Timmy chatted me up about irons and starch and how a little spit in the shoe polish could help my poor, flat black dress shoes.

By the end of the semester we were best friends. Tim was a rarity among us, already married and attending Biola University, a Christian college down the road. He only drove up to USC on corps day once a week. Over the next three-and-a-half years Tim and I drank beer together, drove up to the Owens Valley to fish for trout together, sat in the hot tub of his apartment complex in Fullerton and talked about life together. He taught me how to marinate and grill a steak. He was the best man at my ill-fated first attempt at marriage. He was funny as hell, self-deprecating and always ready with the quip that called you up short. He was as bad at golf as your author, but our mutual ineptitude made the meander around the executive course sort of fun.

Everyone figured Tim was headed to something great in the Air Force, but the wheels came off when they shipped him to the introductory flight course at Hondo. He said the instructor had it out for him. Who knows? I just recall he didn't finish the program, was never commissioned, and not long after he and military parted ways he and Leslie got divorced. A lousy year for my old friend.

Then he met his second wife, an exotic dancer at a bar in an industrial quarter of Orange County. He took me there to meet her, this girl who had him over the moon. She was wearing pasties and a g-string. I found the encounter awkward. A few months later they were back in her home town in Indiana where they married. I was in his wedding party.

From there we drifted apart. He became an investment advisor and we got crossways when I perceived he was churning my account. We became parents, and soon were too busy for much contact even after the investment thing was long ago water under the bridge.

Then came the news, eleven years ago now, that Tim has developed a fatal neurological disorder that would inexorably shrink his world over the next decade. When we saw each other in 2014 he needed forearm crutches to walk, and speech had begun to leave him. When he and Sherry came down and had dinner with Peg and me in 2019, he was in a wheelchair and the aphasia had become more pronounced. He took up painting while he could still work a brush, and sent me a seascape that's still on my shelf at the farm in Perry. In the end, he was left typing messages by looking at the letters on a screen.

But the damnedest thing was that he never lost his sense of humor, at least not that I could see. The big Japanese guy who used to announce when he was going flying that we should let the air traffic controllers know that there would be "a little nip in the air"* was still in there, trapped but strangely cheerful.

And no, he wasn't even remotely religious in my experience. So it wasn't that. He was just a tenacious guy. I guess that's why, after we'd all moved on to our first Air Force assignments, he went back and finished his degree at USC. Not a lot of quit in that one.

Tim died almost exactly a month ago. I sat in the condo in PC and wept, for the first time in a very long time, when Sherry and the girls sent out the news in a Facebook Messenger post. I hadn't talked to Timmy in months, figuring I'd find the time eventually. Then I didn't. Then Sherry planned sort of a shotgun funeral only four days after we all learned of Tim's death. There was no way P and I could get to Floyd's Knob, Indiana that quickly. Too much going on. Didn't these people know we were busy?

And that, I guess, is the point of the story. A guy who had been like a big brother to me as I was learning how to be an officer and a man falls ill, endures a horrible senescence as his body fails him and leaves his mind intact, and I've been too preoccupied with other things, work or money or Trump or whatever, to drop him a line or to be there as his family grieves.

There's a certain solipsism in this sort of self-flagellation that I find distasteful in others and myself. That's not really where I'm trying to go, however. I just need to be reminded, as do we all, that these things we let fill our days may crowd out the only things that really matter, love and being there for each other. Something to ponder.

*For the younger crowd who weren't raised around World War II veterans, "Nip" was a derogatory term for the Japanese, derived from "Nippon".