Meghan amongst the leaves

I was in the heart of Penn Station when I got the text message from Meghan. “Tim Russert is Dead. Your thoughts?”

I always appreciated that my opinion mattered to people. Meghan and I had, since graduation, drifted apart as I tend to do with most people. I can’t keep pace on short notice, I don’t have it in me.

But the other day she sent me an e-mail with an article from The Onion with some satirical article about one of the video games I play. She had this to say…

“Vermont is awesome. I can't find a good job though. I'm ok, i miss the boston bars.

Meghan always had a succinct way of phrasing something. As much as I don’t care for him, she has a Salinger way about her writing, you get a whole emotional picture from one line of text.

But I have to say that it depressed the crap out of me. Not that shes gone or that she can’t find a job, but that sometimes we move on for reasons that aren’t the best. Or we’ve told ourselves that to not move on is to somehow stunt ourselves and we end up having this self-hating complex building up.

I tend to write about the still frozen image, as if at some point as a child I’d seen an old photo from the 70’s with a guy who looked like the life of the party, and then I was told that he was dead. This isn’t to suppose I find Meghan dead, but gone in the same fashion and that 40 years on I might look back and wonder whatever happened to her. She was a force unto herself, she was well educated but she didn’t give a damn for school and I respected that about her. The academic world is self-serving and some bite the bullet and get through, and some of us couldn’t be bothered by the fickle fascinations of some egotistical professor.

I can see her in those paisley tights she wore to Ambers wedding, and the jazz hands she’d use whenever she was mocking some terrible idea is that vaudevillian raspy voice. Now I see those things in front of the back drop of some green covered spring ski mountain, lying dormant waiting for winter to give it life again. Vermont to me has always been a lace for people to vacation and you didn’t move there unless you’re some transcendental hippie. To say you miss the boston bars, suggests to me that the metropolitan kitsch is decidedly vacant from the pubs up there.

And maybe its how I see Vermont that’s the problem, a heterogeneous mixture of like-minded individuals that by virtue of what Boston is, simply cannot exist here. I’ve met more interesting people on the bus here than I likely could in Vermont. To see a personality like hers, one that no doubt gave way to interesting dialogue and had to inspire its share of young minds in such a fertile place is a shame to me, and certainly a loss to the city.

For one reason or another, I get the impression that people go off to these places and die, or more accurately, become someone else. And maybe that’s what I fear the most. But in being realistic I know Boston wasn’t always a kind environment for her. I imagine I’ll tell my children stories about a lot of the people I’ve met, and how their from all over, and all the places I’d met them. But in the back of my mind I hope that don’t finish like so many of my fathers d…“yeah yeah…he’s dead now…cancer.”

I can’t honestly write about everyone I know or all those who’ve made an impact on my life but I can say that when I write about these people, I hope you see some of yourself in here (if you’re out there reading), the the sentiments I hold about one is applicable to the other, and if somewhere along the way we’ve lost touch or don’t communicate like we ought to that I think about lost friends more than I would care to think about. Maybe this is just an apology. I’m unintentionally elusive, and I drive myself toward goals that don’t allow me to pull others along, and for this I’m sorry, but your value is not diminished in my mind, and I forget very little of our friendship back then.