Last day of the weak.

Summer is just ripened, I realized Friday, riding home after work with Adam. The evenings are so full of dusty light and the trees are plump with summer's own green. You'll linger over a ripe pear, no longer crisp like an apple, or a peach you were willing to wait for, letting it turn, and no matter how hard you try you can't suck the pit clean. But the brownyellow summers, the green strawberries, the summers that come in floods or ticks, the summers of florescent lights and tinted windows, they wane in memory, a tart reminder only useful for contrast. Summer will get soft soon, the night will sneak earlier, and the heat will swell until summer starts ripping along the seams, and autumn will slip in, summer ripe, too-ripe, gone.

Friday night was my high school's 10th reunion's pre-party at Johnny's Tavern in Olathe, as Austin reminded me as we rolled 10 miles an hour down the long gravel driveway, the center line grown over but trimmed, to the Perdaris estate, out across from Heritage Park. As much as I wanted to go to the pre-party, knowing how many people likely didn't want to shell out the $55 to go to the big to-do the next night, so I could only see them Fridat, I felt like the going-away party for our friends Vika and Jonathon was more important. Same reason I was late for church Sunday night: sometimes friends are more important than events. Well, always.

We were coming, via Adam's bus stop (some stairs to nowhere on Pennsylvania), from a party at Jill's work, their 20th anniversary. The place was crowded with men wearing shirts open to the second lack-of-button and women in cocktail dresses and heels. They had catered with stuffed mushrooms, and lemon shrimp and scallops on skewers, and spirals of chicken on unsharpened toothpicks, and zucchini and onion pancakes, and spicy popcorn, and two kinds of fruit/nut/olive medleys, and veggies with onion dip and pecan butter dip, and seafood salad on blini. Yeah, blini. Someone ordered Minsky's for the kids, and I heard someone else got the job of cutting it up into hors dourves size pieces because at fancy parties, full slices of pizza aren't chic, or something. But Minsky's is good no matter the size of the slice.

People stood around half-eating, drinking the free booze and making their small talk, which I failed at. I was tired, and when I'm tired, I can't get up for meaninglessness. Except it's not meaninglessness, really. People are trying to connect, trying to have a good time, trying to escape something to know someone to be somebody. But in my fog, I couldn't remember to try to make it happen. I kept meeting people, kept forgetting names, kept eating the food. What do you do at a party like that? I've never known. Now if only I could break my way into all meaningful conversations I want to have, but can't find a way.

Even though it was stifling outside, they had a jazz band playing, and the smokers stood around in the shade over by a side door, begging for scraps of air conditioning. We stood out with them for a while, Jill's work friends among them, and the talk was just as small as it was inside. But Jill had already said something to me, reminded me to be present, so I tried to perk it up, get with the program. I'd say I mildly succeeded, made a couple jokes, offered unheard help to a friend of Jill's who said she was allergic to the unlabeled pecan butter, and needed to go to the hospital, her EpiPen was in her blocks-away car, but then she stood around like nothing was wrong, and I didn't bring it up again because she didn't. Like a nodding-off driver, all it took me to engage was a reminder I wasn't engaging. Even so, I was tired, and on the way to get Adam, I filled up on the 44 0z diet Mountain Dew from Quik Trip, because that is a wagon I am very much back on, much to my, and surprisingly few others', chagrin.

Later on, at the going-away party, we sat around talking in lawn chairs, the bugs whirling around the lamp post, bocce and badminton lost to the waning light, all of us drenched Jen's home-mixed all-natural bug spray and sweat, talking. Iron Chef, and family business causing family heartache, and babies.

We'd stayed at the Perdaris house for a few months on our way back from the Belarus all-summer in 2004. Summers there are like a six-moth spring, cool rain and always budding. The Perdarises were good friends, and they let us store stuff in their barn while we were gone, and it was almost natural for them to let us come stay. Jill and I spent half the year living out of suitcases in different one rooms. The transition from the missions trip lasted longer than the trip itself. I came back all fired up, ready to live like a missionary back in my home culture, and I failed at that, too. Looking for a job always makes me feel inadequate and I let myself get lost in a selfish fog, like being tired, but months long, and you can't take a hit of caffeine for temporary relief. There I was, eating other people's lunches out of the refrigerator, buying Jill super-crappy birthday presents, ignoring promised household chores, playing video games and lounging like a teenager on summer break. Jen sat me down one night, slapped me out of it like real family, kind and direct, instead of booting me out the door like she could have. And I'd like to hope I shaped up lickity, but I can't remember much more of our stay after her kick in the pants of true friendship, and that I tried a whole heck of a lot harder once I knew to try. But I should of known. I still use that event as a touchstone; am I being that guy right now? So, thanks, Jen, for that, and everything else. Thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks.

When we moved out of their house, we moved away, and Jill and I were working through things, and then Jill got busy with school, and I taught high school, and we've rarely hung out with them, and I hate that. Seems like I hardly have time for old friends. It's like each time I take a step, I'm leaving droves of friends behind, Moscow, Minsk, Olathe North, Emporia, Olathe Bible. But sitting around, drinking bottled water as Vika shot people with the water gun, and Juliet got her back with ice water from the cooler, and the night was warm and waning, it felt a little bit like old times, friends in early summer, before it's gone full.