August Friends

I am in a Middle Ages recreation group, and without getting into too many details, we have an annual gathering of about 10K-13K people who show up, set up camp, and wear medieval clothes for two weeks. I have been doing this for around twenty years. I've accumulated a lot of friends over the years; a lot of whom I only see once a year for those two weeks. I wrote this one night after losing someone I had known, and looked forward to seeing every year.

August Friends

Once a year, for two weeks our names are common to each other. We greet as though no time has passed; as we have always greeted with a smile and a “Welcome home.” For just a little while we even forget that there is a world beyond the August that we wrap around ourselves like a blanket.

I have known you for ten years but I may not know your real name. How many kids or grand kids you have. Or how you take your coffee. But that doesn’t change the fact that I look forward to seeing you. To the sound of your voice. To finding you wandering down a busy dirt street the way you always have. Those streets that have your footprints forever in their dust.

I may see you coming off the field of battle, or from a class. Offer to help you carry your things, visit a while. Maybe invite you to have a beer by my fire, or see you later that night at a party or two. Perhaps I will only see you in passing as we’re both very busy--but next year. Next year we promise to take time for each other. We promise that our August lives will slow down enough that we will have time. Time on our vacation to just spend being. Existing.

And then we will go back to our other lives. The ones where we make the money to afford this world. We will hardly think about each other, or the world we just left. Now and again, we may see each other referenced in an email, or a blog post and we will think “Yeah. We promised to make time next year…”

But eventually that year will not pass.

One year you will not come back and I will never see you again. I will miss you. Your warm, greeting hug. The way you look in the sunlight, happy to be “home” again with the families we have chosen as ours. I will drink a beer in your honor and think about you. Watch your boat burn on the lake. Think about how maybe we were always a little too busy. And then I will scuttle off to another meeting that seems important at the time.

Good bye August friend. I will miss you.