Keeping in touch

I was in a pharmacy today and digging through their stack of magazines I found a copy of Entertainment Weekly from January 2004. It had the usual best/worst of the previous year, along with a list of celebrity deaths. I had no idea that Rerun from What's Happening died in 2003. But he did.

Sometimes it takes the recollected passing of a one-time celebrity to make you realize that the years don't order themselves as neatly as those "Greatest Hits of the " albums do. Things blur and fade, especially as you add years to your resume and you no longer memorize the release dates of your favorite rock stars' albums. These days of course I'm lucky if I know a name of a song or two on an album, even ones I've listened to a hundred times.

I'm not sure what to do about it all. As T.S. Eliot might have said, "I have measured out my life in 8 track tapes."

It's also an age old truth that nothing breaks up friendships quite like having kids. Sure people think that getting married is a sign of settling down, but I think our nation's divorce rate gives the lie to that old saw. The true mark of settling down is having kids -- at least having kids that you feel responsible to. As soon as a couple has kids, their childless friends no longer see them out at clubs; they don't hang around the coffee shop or give up half a weekend day to play sports. For all practical intents and purposes, they cease to exist. For the child's parents, complete isolation gives way around age two to things called "play dates," in which children match up with their peers and the parents try their best to find some common ground with the other parents. When this ground fails to appear, chance meetings at the day care center can get awkward.

Kids keep you in at night, that is for certain. Raised properly, they dictate your life, too. We have friends on the west coast and it used to be relatively painless to jet out there every now and then -- two fares, please. However, you add the family and that five hundred dollars just became $1000 (sorry, but lap seating is not an option if you intend to get any relief on the plane), and then you have to lug all that child equipment around. Not to mention that once you're dragging around the kids, it becomes really bad form to get drunk on the plane.