ISawArkansas

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“If you can’t stop smoking, learn to play the clarinet,” she said to no one in particular. “It’s like God gave us tools for living but all we do is throw them at each other. Then we light up.”

Janis helped herself to another bowl of pozole while the rest of us wondered if cigarettes are tools.

It’s good to be with friends and talk freely. No recordings, no apologies, no one who gets all frothy at what we say. Just eat homemade cheap food and speculate on how deep our depth is, really. Can we get to a hypnotic state if we think hard enough?

Sometimes we wanted relief from asking why healthcare is so expensive and not knowing where that money goes. Sometimes we didn’t care whatever happened to the Community Development Partnership. Sometimes we didn’t want to talk about Margaret Atwood writing that men are afraid women will laugh at them and women are afraid men will kill them.

Three of us at the dinner table said we like to rub our fingers across pictures in the paper of people and animals we like. The fourth person just laughed and said he did that, too. “Depends on the picture,” he said.

We talked about how the Ozarks are Tick Central, how we still believed that if we worked really hard we would be provided for, and even though it’s a white-guys world, the white guys we know are exuberant, enlightened and reliable, and would hand the world over if they knew how.

This dinner party was 52 months ago, September 2015.

And now only two of us are still alive and it’s hard finding replacements.

Kobe Bryant’s death shocked networks, athletes, coaches and the nation. We didn’t know him, but we mourn him – the circumstance, the wife and mother who lost half her family, the jolt of the wealthy and famous experiencing scary tragedy.

But Kobe’s death didn’t take out of us what Janis Murray’s and Al Muyskens’ did. We knew them. We loved them.

“All life is based on energy and adapts to change,” pragmatists tell us.

“Cram it,” we think.

But our energy on these two recent deaths has been slurped dry. Don’t want to get out of bed, don’t want to watch TV, don’t feel like taking turmeric so we won’t catch the flu. It’s like typing when your fingers are on the wrong letters and you’re not looking until it’s plumb too late and you have a letter written in Sumerian. It’s just wrong.

The only obstacle Janis couldn’t overcome was the one that took her away. We spent many conversations over 47 years fussing over the placement of rocking chairs on the porch in our old age, and many more talking about how the first of us to die would definitely give a shout out to the one still here, to assure the survivor that all was as we envisioned – no fear, no pain, just happy flying around.

We rarely agreed on anything but couldn’t get enough of each other. We were safe together.

“Nothing is fitting. The dead people ran really long this week.” That practical remark came out of our composition department while putting this paper together tonight.

Don’t know about Kobe, whose obit ran longer than anyone in our paper, but that remark would make Al and Janis spew their wine into the pozole. And we didn’t know Kelee Overgaard, but we’ll bet a nickel she would’ve laughed, too.

And of course there is no death, just an entrance into a fuller life.

Cram that, too. Death bites.