Oh My Friends, My Friends Forgive Me, That I Live And You Are Gone, There's A Grief That Can't Be Spoken, There's A Pain Goes On And On

--"Empty Chairs at Empty Tables", Michael Ball for the Les Miserables Tenth Anniversary Concert

You were chastising me for being cocky that day. I remember that because we were having soup at "this great place close by and not out of the way," which turned out to be thirty minutes out of the way, but still great. I thought it's impossible for one to be cocky while eating soup. I may have even told you that; there's just no way to eat soup aggressively. Then we proceeded to debate the vagaries of soup eating and the social posturing that occurs while one is consuming soup. It was one of those hypothetical debates that concluded a lot more seriously than intended yet still managed to provide much needed levity to a tense situation. I had clam chowder (what else?) and you had broccoli cheddar. I had driven us so you offered to buy lunch which I thought was very nice of you since it had been my suggestion to go for soup in the first place.

I remember there were the faint strains of "Super Trouper" over the radio which I've always liked, but remembered you hated. No good groups came before the 80s was your motto and your creed. We'd debated about that too in the past. That time I didn't even need to tell you what I was thinking because you said there was a special level of hell reserved for ABBA and ABBA cultists. I just smiled, maybe bobbed my head a little, and you knew where my head was at. I never defined myself as an ABBA cultist, but definitely a patron. Sometimes I wish you could have heard when I heard them play. Sometimes I wish you could have seen what I saw when I saw the world. But that would make as much sense as asking you to agree with me on principle. Where would the fun be in that?

That would have been like debating why I like clam chowder and you liked broccoli cheddar. It's a soup built around a vegetable. I didn't get it. I still don't. The day vegetables are the show to meat's or bread's prelude is the day I reconsider my whole theory that vegetables killed the dinosaurs. I enjoyed my soup. You enjoyed yours that day. That was the important fact, not the fact we disagreed about a great many things. Supposedly, I was cocky and you were humble, but I seem to recall many an instance where you flashed a little tenacity and broke for the hills on a moment's notice. That was what was so great about you--you could pick pretty great places for soup and you could pick your battles pretty adequately. You never fought just to fight. You never disagreed to disagree. For you to stick your opinion in it had either to be for a good reason... or for a good laugh, which often were intertwining goals for you.

Eventually, I was getting to the dregs of my bowl. All the clams had been claimed and all the chowder had been chowed. I asked you innocently if you wanted to try some. When you said yes, I proceeded to drop the rest of the contents of my bowl into your bowl. Then I waited for the explosion. On a scale from sparkler to Hiroshima, yours didn't even rate a cigarette butt. You just kept right on eating on your intermingling soup, my screwed-up face watching on, and told me that it didn't taste all that bad. On further review, it was just cheddar, broccoli, potatoes, and chowder in one lump sum. Nothing to fret there. I guess it was just the thought of two things that weren't together being deposited on top of one another. It sounded more gross than it actually was. All I remember was afterwards, watching you finish the soup(s) with such gusto in your performance, was how much I still wanted to eat mine.


where my friends will meet no more

That was you, though, taking all I could give and never flinching.

----

I had the chance to go back to that soup place this past weekend, the first since you died. I even ordered the same things--broccoli cheddar and clam chowder. This time I mixed them both beforehand.

I imagined it didn't taste half as good as when we were there together.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers