I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

Yesterday The Amazing Bob and I celebrated the anniversary of our getting hitched, the knot being inextricably tied, the solemn observance of matrimonial shackles donned, the day we made all that sexy-time legal in the state of Massachusetts.

Now then, the getting hitched biz happened years, scads, eons after we initially hooked up, set eyes on each other and had our very first conversational riff. That inaugural banter involved Philip K Dick titles, the habits of water-dwelling, predatory animals, old jazz dudes and his son’s name (Miles — AKA The Green Miles) and more. This badinage naturally set off every damn last one of the love/sex/love/fun/NEED receptors in our tiny brains. Yeah, it was astronomically huge, mad love at first conversation. We got each other.

Since the matrimonial bijou bit came light years+12 after that first reality altering conversation, we just mark January 27th as our overall Celebration of Wild Crazy Love.

Dave is the one on the left exuding Eddy Haskell-ish menace

Here are some brief observations on friendship from Bob:

“I’ve been lucky about friends — don’t have a lot but the few I have are durable. I’ve been close friends with two people for about 30 years. One of those is my soul-mate Donna*.

I’ve been good friends with Dave for over 60 years now.

Thinking about things that we all have in common — we all like cats, we all used to play sandlot baseball**, we all like cookies. Among the four of us (Donna, Dave, Joe and me), we’ve accumulated four marriages, three divorces, two military tours, an abundance of surgeries and (I flatter myself***) four equally agile wits.

There’s a song by the Beatles which says “I get by with a little help from my friends.”

There it is."

*Yes, yes, I pay him to say such lovely and romantic stuff.

**Bob totally misrepresents himself here — he wasn’t just a sandlot baseball player, he was an outfield gazelle — the Baryshnikov of second base.

*** Does not — he’s being baldly truthful. So there PLHBT!