“What Was I Saying?”

Hometown friends are awesome.

Hometown wakes and funerals…

…not so much.

I made my way through the gathering of friends in my hometown, on the way to pay my respects for a high school classmate and I felt weird about being happy to see so many people.

What really strikes me is that I can pick up a 10 or 20 or 30-year old conversation I was having with someone as though we had spoken yesterday.

And the other thing that happens is that life runs like a movie in my brain when I see those old faces.

I saw Paulie and we immediately recounted a softball tourney that we damn near won after forming our team in a bar the night before.

That tournament was 27 years ago.

I passed by Charlie and immediately busted on him about the Mets turd of a season. He shot back with some anti-Yankee talk.

I saw Carmen and we chatted about our basketball shooting. We both could hit the long shots back in the day.

“I couldn’t get a 20-feet shot anywhere near the rim now,” he said.

And I waited in line with my great friends, Kathy and Jeff, and that’s where the memory video really sharpened.

We’d lost a friend.

We’d stop by her house every time we’d hit the golf course - and we’d have long conversations with every member of the family.

“Blink of an eye,” I mentioned more than once.

And for more than an hour, we held court in the waiting room of the worst gathering place known to man - a funeral parlor - and we picked up on those long-running, never-ending conversations.

I finally hit the sidewalk in the center of the town where I’d grown.

It seems smaller somehow.

Yet those conversations are anything but small…

…and the loss of friends is big.