Where's Morris Buttermaker When You Need Him?

What the hell is wrong with kids' sports today?


If this is a question that you've been pondering lately, then it's your lucky day because I'm coming out of a self-imposed blogging retirement to tell you.


Remember the good old days when you could try out as many sports as you wanted and you were guaranteed a spot on the team?  Those days are over.  Today kids have to "pick their sport" by second grade so they can get down to the business of training.   How do I know this?  Because my third grade son is in the process of trying out for spring baseball teams.  This means he goes to try-outs that last three hours and does everything in his power to impress coaches so that he can have a chance to play baseball again in the spring.  If he makes it, he'll train all winter so that his team can be competitive.  Does this sound like The Sandlot to you?  No, it's more like gymnastics training in Communist Russia.  And I for one am not up for watching the spirit of my son and his little friends be slowly crushed by a bunch of Commies.  This is where you all yell "Wolverines!" and help me kick their asses.


Seriously, though, is this what sports is all about?  Furthermore, is it what we want childhood to be all about?  I think not.  While not exactly athletic, I am a huge sports fan.  I love the feel-good nature of sports films.  I love underdogs and reluctant heroes and unexpected friendships.  I love the whole mythology of sports and I think every child deserves to have a few years when they can be a part of that mythology.  That doesn't mean I think they should all be in the MLB or play in college or even in high school.  But I think while they are young, every kid deserves a chance. 


Ever hear the story about how Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player we have ever seen (if only because Len Bias didn't live to show him up), was cut from his high school basketball team?  What does this prove?  It proves that the top athlete when you're eight or nine won't necessarily be the top athlete when you're 14 or 18 or 25.  But if he's made to feel like he isn't good enough at a young age, that athlete might give up.  Kids shouldn't give up before their bodies and their minds have time to develop.  What a waste it would be if the next Cal Ripken's spirit is crushed when he's just a child and we never get to see that greatness come to fruition.  And just as wasteful is crushing the spirit of a ball player who will never be great.  Who cares?  Every moment in life is not about competition.  Some moments can just be about fun.  And no one should take those moments from our children.


My very favorite movie is Field of Dreams.  I cry every time I watch it and I want desperately to play catch with my dad even though I can't catch anything to save my life.  At the end of the movie, the voice says "Ease his pain" and Ray Kinsella thinks the voice is talking about his dad's pain, but the Ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson tells him "No, it was you, Ray".  I wish I could wrap all the children I know up in my arms and take them to that field.  Ease their pain.  And play a little baseball just for fun.  That's what sports should be about.  It's what life should be about.  And the fact that it isn't is the start of what's wrong with our world.

For Marianne on Mother's Day 2013

I didn’t know the last day I spent with my mother would be the last – but she did. 

When we were saying goodbye, she hugged me in a way that was different from how she had hugged me before and then she told me that I was a wonderful daughter and that she was sorry for being so hard on me because, although she’d never said it before, she thought I was perfect.  At that moment, I just thought we were having a really awesome day, but later I knew that she was saying goodbye and at the same time giving me the greatest gift of my life: Absolution.

It’s something I’ve had a harder time getting from other members of my family.  Or giving to people who I perceive have wronged me.  Forgiveness is a tough one.  Maybe it’s because we’re Irish or maybe it’s because we’re mean but it doesn’t come easy in my family.  Never has.

When I was in first grade my elementary school had a talent show.  My mom suggested I dress up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow”.  Anyone who has ever heard me sing knows this was a horrible idea.  But my mom insisted that I could and should do it and she would not take no for an answer.  So instead of fighting her or humiliating myself, I just told her that the talent show was for kids only, no parents, and that, of course, I would be performing as Dorothy.  The day of the talent show when she came to pick me up she was first greeted by a friend’s mom who asked her why she hadn’t been at the show to watch me and one of my little friends performing itsy bitsy spider together.  She smiled her super scary politician fake smile, made up an excuse, grabbed me by the wrist and walked me to the car in a way that made me feel as if the school parking lot was the green mile.  She spoke to me not at all on the ride home and then sent me to my room.  When she came in to “talk” to me an hour later, I tried to explain how I didn’t want to hurt her feelings but I just could not sing alone; she heard none of it.  She felt zero empathy for the shamed, scared, sad little six year old in front of her. Instead she just stared at me and said “you’re a liar” and left.  And then she brought the incident up every single time I did anything wrong for the next twenty one years.  I have relived that talent show lie so many times it’s as if it just happened last week, instead of in 1976.  That’s a long time to be struggling with guilt over something you did as a six year old. 

It could have been worse, though.  At least the six year old talent show lie didn’t result in my complete banishment.  The possibility of being shut out was always there in my house.  My grandmother on my Dad’s side had no relationship with us.  To this day, I still don’t exactly understand why.  I know she suffered greatly when my grandfather died young from Hodgkin’s disease and she was left to raise three children on her own.  And I understand that kind of hardship can take a serious toll on a person, but you would think she would have clung to my father, her only son.   She was still talking to him at least when he married my mother because she is in the pictures, but sometime between their wedding and my birth, she decided that having a relationship with my parents was not important to her.  There are three sides to that story, but as a parent, a daughter and a grandchild, I can only believe that she was wrong.  Wrong to give up on her son, and wrong to miss out on a relationship with me and my brothers.  I actually met her only once in person.  My mother took my brothers and me over to her house to get some childhood pictures of my dad for a gift she was making him.  I don’t remember much except that she had a very rambunctious poodle and a lot of pictures of her other grandchildren but was completely uninterested in us.  And trust me, we were cute.  A grandmother who could close her heart to us was a grandmother that I didn’t want or need – but the idea that she lived thirty minutes from me and didn’t talk to any of us haunted me.  How could family be so disposable?

            My mom’s parents, however, were constant presences in our lives.  Grandma and Pa visited often and watched us overnight when my parents had to go out of town.  Unfortunately, Pa died suddenly of a heart attack when I was only eleven.  We were watching TV as a family when suddenly a picture of my brother – Kevin Joseph – fell off the wall for no reason.  The Irish believe that when this happens someone in the picture is going to die.  So Kevin and I cried and wailed because we thought he was going to die.  At the same time, across town at my mom’s first cousin’s house, a picture of St. Joseph fell from the wall, again, for no reason.  Hours later my grandfather, Joe Pitts, was dead.  And with him died my family’s healthy relationship with grandparents.

            My Grandma was not a woman who knew how to be alone.  Pa had always taken care of her and when he was gone, she was lost.  She lived for twelve years after he died, but it wasn’t a life.  It was more like just waiting out the days until she could be reunited with him.  And while I believe the enormity of her loss was real, the way she handled it was wrong.  See she didn’t just wait out her days in peace; she spent them suffocating my mother with love disguised as guilt and the two of them battled until they were both broken from it.  Every summer my grandmother would come to stay with us and while it would always start off fun, it ended the same way every year – with Grandma sitting outside on her suitcase waiting for someone to drive her to her sister-in-law’s house and my mom inside crying wishing that her relationship with her mother wasn’t so hard.

            We didn’t know it at the time because mental illness wasn’t something that people talked about like they do today, but my mother was severely manic depressive.  I loved my grandmother but I think her problems had more to do with being self absorbed and profoundly sad, not mentally ill.  Her daughter on the other hand was sick.  And her sickness permeated not just our family, but of all her relationships and all of ours.  When she was happy, she was the best mother in the world.  I remember the good times and I cannot believe I was so lucky to have a mother like her.  She was fun, she was kind, she was the life of any party.  My mom had charisma and people loved her.  We loved her.  But we also feared her because you never knew who you were coming home to – the wonderful mother or the scary one. 

            Living with someone whose whole personality can change without reason is scary.  I would leave for school in the morning and I would be stressing all day about what would happen when I got home.  What could set her off?  Would she look in my sock drawer and think it was messy and bring up the talent show lie again?  Would she run into one of my friend’s moms whose daughter she thought was smarter or prettier or thinner than me and decide to remind me of that?  Or would she have a good day and greet me with hugs and snacks and laughter?  I never knew so every day I lived in a world of complete anxiety.  Anxiety so high that when I think about it now my heart races and I feel like I might cry.  Anxiety that I never want my kids to have so I overcompensate by reminding them after every time out how good or bad, happy or sad, I always, always love them.  Anxiety that at once paralyzed me and made me want to run far, far away. 

            Living in a world where the people closest to you are not people you can depend on makes it hard to depend on anyone.  For me, it made me not want to deal with anyone who I believed wronged me.  So I didn’t give out a lot of second chances, if I decided I didn’t like you, I just cut ties and moved on.  Well, moved on isn’t exactly right.  If you’re holding a bitter grudge you have not moved on and I could hold a grudge like nobody’s business.  Combine that with the fact that I have never been one to shy away from confrontation and I was the kind of person you did not want as an enemy.   I was filled with so much anger that at one point I had a mental list I kept of people I thought were so horrible that they were for sure going to hell.  Do you think those people wasted a moment of their time thinking or worrying about me?  No.  But I spent hours obsessing about how awful they were and how they’d wronged me, all the while wasting my own precious time on people who most likely no longer thought of me at all. 

            And then my son Mac was born and as soon as I saw him I wanted my mom.  But she wasn’t there.  She’d been gone for eight years by the time I had my first child.  In those first stressful days of motherhood, I thought of her almost every minute.  I thought about how hard her job had been and how I had never understood that while she was alive.  I thought about how mad I was that she had left me and how I would never in a million years be able to do such a thing to my Mac.   And I imagined what a magnificent grandmother she would have been and cursed her for depriving my baby of that.  I am not manic myself but in those days I sometimes felt like I was because my mother was constantly on my mind and the range of emotions I was feeling made me, at last, able to empathize with her plight.  That empathy allowed me to finally forgive her and that forgiveness freed me from all the other anger I was holding onto.

            I forgot about grudges.  I stopped wasting time worrying about whether or not people liked me.  I just stopped being mad.  Instead I spent all my time making sure that my son was happy and that I was someone he could count on no matter what else was going on.  I took all the good things I’d learned about parenting from my own almost perfect mother and forgot all the bad things.   And when I did that the clouds parted and the sun finally shined in.

            I still get mad and there have been a few instances where I have felt someone was toxic enough that I could no longer hold them dear but overall I cleaned house of my anger.  And I put people who I thought brought out the worst in me at arm’s length, or sometimes a little further.  I’m lucky that the three people I love the most – my husband and my two boys – bring out the best in me so I pulled them in even closer.  Losing the anger was like having gastric bypass – I felt so much lighter.  Nothing weighs you down more than a grudge.

            When my mom died, the funeral home for her wake had a line out the door and wrapped around the corner.  People came out of the woodwork to pay their respects to her and to our family.  My brother was mean to some of the guests who he didn’t think were true friends of my mom.  I was kind to them all because I understood what it was like to have a relationship with her.  I knew that she was capable of giving you some of the best and worst moments of your life.  And so even if toward the end some of those people had not been as close to her, I believe they came to the wake because they remembered the good times.  And I believe from her place in heaven she had let go of her grudges and was happy to see all her friends turn out for her.

            The day of my mother’s funeral my brother was crying in our kitchen.  I put my arm around him in a show of affection and support.  He looked me in the eye and said “I only spoke to you the last ten years because mom made me.  Now that she’s gone, you’re dead to me, too”.  I thought my mother’s death would bring my family closer together but I was wrong.  It’s been fifteen years and my brother has kept his promise.  He will not speak to me.  He has not met my children.  And he managed to turn my other younger, gentler brother against me, too.  If not for my dad and my own two children, I would have no blood family at all and that’s a really hard pill to swallow.

            The thing is I’m not angry.  Every couple months I call or text or email one of my brothers to remind them that I’m still here.  They never answer or reply but it doesn’t stop me from doing it.  I just want to make sure that on the day they realize the anger has to go, they are not afraid to call me because I will always be open to their return to my life.  And sure, it’s also a little antagonistic but I’m human right? 

            My mom was wearing a black dress with hot pink shoes and a hot pink bag.   She was at her skinniest which was always really important to her and her arms looked great.  We sat in the window of The Red Tomato in Bethesda at a tall table and shared a brie pizza.  She said she loved my haircut and that I looked pretty.  Usually she would say that I “could be so pretty if …” but on that day there was no if.  We talked about my job, about our favorite TV shows and the errands she had to do later that day.  We didn’t talk at all about the future, I guess because she already knew that we didn’t have one.   She was dead five days later.

            For a long time when I would think of her, I would picture her on life support.  I would remember getting the call from my dad in the morning and knowing as soon as I heard his voice how things were going to end.  I would remember sitting by her hospital bedside sobbing and begging her to wake up.  I would remember saying prayers that I knew weren’t going to be answered because even though her body was right there next to me, she was already gone.  And I’d remember how mad I was at her for leaving.  But I don’t do that anymore.

            Now when I think of her I choose to remember her in the black dress with the pink shoes standing on the corner of St Elmo and Norfolk in Bethesda hugging me and telling me she loved me and then walking away.  I watched her walk down the street that day and I’ve watched her walk away a million times since then in my mind.  It’s taken a long time, but the gift she gave me at that lunch is something I’ve finally been able to return.  I love her.  I miss her.  And I absolutely forgive her. And I’m sure that makes her feel lighter, even in heaven.

Fairytales

When I logged onto Facebook yesterday morning, I felt a collective swoon from all my female Facebook friends (and even one male friend which was kind of cute!). The Royal Wedding. I think everyone worldwide who watched it today would agree that Kate Middleton is flawlessly beautiful and so poised. And she seemed genuinely giddy with happiness, as did her Prince. So I get why millions of people have fallen under the spell of Prince William and his bride. I'm just not one of them.

Don't get me wrong. I think she seems like a lovely girl. And I think Prince William may not be The Handsome Prince, but he is certainly The Charming one and if you can't have both then sometimes that's the better catch.

I remember watching his parents wedding with my mother when I was a little girl. My mother idolized Diana. Her style, her charisma, her obvious good nature....everything about Diana was fascinating to my mother. I thought Diana looked scared and sad on her wedding day. And I thought Charles looked serious and mean and not very cute. My mother was devastated when their royal marriage broke up. I, on the other hand, was not shocked. I'd known from across the pond via network television at the age of eleven that he didn't love her. I never bought the fairytale.

And that's why I have a hard time buying into this one. It's a different story, of course. William and Kate have been together for seven years. They know each other well. And they really seem to love each other. Unlike his father on his wedding day, William looked overjoyed to see his bride. So to paraphrase Carl the Groundskeeper, "I guess they've got that going for them - which is nice".

The thing is I think there is so much stacked against them - especially for her. This is William's destiny. He knows nothing else. But Kate was a regular girl. A girl who was bullied by mean girls in boarding school because she was shy and nice. A girl who loves fashion (and who wouldn't with her body, right?) but also loves privacy. The loss of privacy almost killed Diana. It turned her bulmic and anxiety ridden. It drove her years after her divorce from Charles to race from the still relentless papparazzi to her death. I hope the loss of a normal life is easier for Kate. Or better yet, I hope she and William find a way to have periods of normalcy in their very public life the way he did as a child with his mother.

I got married in front of 86 people. And having those 86 eyes on me was almost more than I could take. I can't open presents in front of people. And unless I'm giving a speech about someone or something else, I hate everyone looking at me. People find this strange because in the small circles where I am comfortable, I am quite the extrovert...especially after a few beers. But in reality, I am painfully shy which is why the idea of having to walk out on a balcony in front of the whole world and kiss my husband seems like the worst idea ever. But for Kate it must not have seemed so bad because she looked pretty smiley up there.

I watched Diana's funeral on TV with three of my best friends. We were at the beach for a girls' weekend during a time when my life was falling apart. As we watched it and I gave them the gory details of what was happening in my personal life, I dubbed myself "Queen of Disaster" and said "well, at least it can't get any worse". Don't ever say that because when you do, it gets much worse. A week later my mother was dead.

When I look at William, I can't help but think about our mothers. I was 27 when mine dies. He was only 15. I still struggle daily and, honestly, not always so gracefully with that loss. William seemed to get through it and honor his mother in such a loving and graceful way. I'm sure today she is so proud. But I'm also sure she worries. Even from heaven. Knowing the pressures of a royal marriage; how could she not?

The morning my mother was buried it rained. My brother told me before we left for the funeral that he had only spoken to me the last ten years because our mom made him and he would never speak to me again. My dad gave us mints in the limo and told us not to cry during the ceremony. I felt completely alone. And then we all stood around my mother's casket in the cemetery, I looked at the people standing there to honor her and towering above all our short, Irish friends was Bobby. Tall and strong and wearing sunglasses in the rain because even though he didn't know her, he knew what a loss she was to me. And I knew I would be okay because I had found my Prince. For me, that was the most romantic moment of my life. There was no crown, no coach, no throngs of crazed fans. Just a look, between me and the person who would be there for me forever. A look he gave me on the saddest day of my life that parted the clouds and gave me a glimpse into the future. And that, my friends, is no Fairytale. It's happily ever after.

A Case against Bambi

I saw a commercial today touting the upcoming re release of the “Walt Disney’s Beloved Coming of Age Story, Bambi” and I thought to myself what a perfect gift for a child you want to watch have a complete emotional meltdown.

Come here, honey, let’s make some popcorn and watch a movie about a cute baby deer who watches his mother get shot to death by a hunter and then gets separated from his dad in a raging forest fire. I think I’ll have to pass on the classic joy of traumatizing my sons.

Mac is already obsessed with death because he realized early that his dad has two parents and I only have one. At two years old, he asked me why I didn’t have a mommy and I had to explain to him as gently as possible that my mom is an angel. Then a year later our parish priest died and Mac burst into tears and said “I never want to be an angel – I want to live in our house with you forever!”.

We watch Spiderman cartoons in our car every day and a day doesn’t pass that Mac, now five, doesn’t ask me “why does Peter Parker live with Aunt May again?” because he is fixated on hearing me explain that Peter’s parents died.

Superheroes are pretty much always really tragic orphans which is super scary for little kids but I guess not as frightening for the grown up nerds that comic books were really created for. This is fine – as I’ve pointed out before there are plenty of adults who make the choice to torture themselves with movies like My Sister’s Keeper or Rabbit Hole. I’m just not one of them. There’s enough sadness in real life so I sort of think entertainment should be happy.

And there is no reason why children should have to experience loss or tragedy until it actually comes their way in real life. Watching Bambi is not going to prepare Mac for losing me. It’s just going to make him obsess about when he’ll lose me and doing that is a waste of the time he could be enjoying as an innocent. A beloved classic should be something that made your child smile, not something that made them question their own mortality. So, sorry Bambi, but you will never be welcome in my house.

Hit Me Baby One More Time

My USWeekly is swimming with pregnant celebrities. Kate Hudson, Jewel, Alicia Silverstone, Selma Blair, Pink, Victoria Beckham, Jane Krakowski, Natalie Portman ----the list goes on and on.

With it being award season these famous pregnant women are parading red carpets nonstop. And it makes me love them. Even the ones like Mrs. Beckham, who always seemed like a plastic to me, and Kate Hudson, who seemed too dumb and self involved for me to tolerate, now fascinate me.

I love pregnant women. And I love babies.

This is great because, whatever is in the water, isn’t just available to celebrities. I have pregnant friends coming out of the woodwork. And all of them are just as gorgeous and fabulous as the aforementioned celebs. Maybe more so. And I am so excited to meet every one of their babies because babies are so much better than shoes, drugs or cats.

Being surrounded by pregnancies makes me remember how sweet my babies smelled. It reminds me of the days when Mac would lie in my bed and nap on my arm while I watched 90210 repeats on Soapnet. It makes me look at Charlie who at 3 is still the baby in our family and never want his little voice to change even if it means he’ll be a really weird adult. No one in your life will ever love you the way your baby will. I hope those celebrity moms don’t miss out on the wonderful, exhausting experience of taking care of a new baby by farming out all the hard hours to nannies. And I hope my pregnant friends, some of whom have older children or high powered jobs or both, are able to get a break from all the craziness to savor that new baby because they don’t stay babies for nearly long enough.

My babies are now wild and willful little boys and they wear me down even on good days but I never ever wish for them to grow up faster. And I never ever doubt that the time I have with them now isn’t something I’ll treasure for the rest of my life.
Even at 41, so far removed from my tween and teen years, I have a memory like a steal trap which enables me to recall how one day I thought my mom was perfect and the next I was completely mortified to be seen with her in the mall.

That day when Mac no longer wants to be seen with me is closer than I want to admit, so today when I can’t get anything done because he wants to be near his one and only Valentine every minute, I’ll take it. And I’ll hold onto this day in ten years when his Valentine is Kate or Fia or Alex or some other much younger girl and not me.

Today I have three extremely handsome Valentines fighting over me. And it’s a very good day.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

41 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

It came again. Which I guess is a good thing because the alternative is that it doesn’t come and that’s never a good thing. No, I’m not talking about my period, although the appearance of that inconvenience is also a welcome thing to me these days.

It’s my birthday. 41 years of me. And I have to tell you, turning 41 sucks way more than turning 40 does. When you have an “event” birthday like 30 or 40, everyone makes such a big deal about it but really nothing changes. But when you have that less exciting 41st or 42nd or 43rd birthday there’s less to celebrate because you haven’t reached some milestone, you’re just continuing to be “in your 40’s” and that makes me sort of cringe.

The thing is that as a kid I thought 40 was so old. Actually, I thought it sounded pretty old until maybe five years ago when it started getting close! But now that I’m actually “in my 40’s”, I don’t feel any older and I certainly don’t feel any different.

I thought that in my 40’s I’d act “grown up”, but I still act like a giddy middle school girl when one of my friends calls or more than likely these days texts me.

I thought that in my 40’s I’d be sure of myself, but I still worry that people don’t like me. That I’m not cute enough. Or smart enough. Or good enough. Will it ever end?

I thought in my 40’s that I’d be strong enough to insulate myself with just the people I love and who I know love me, but I still obsess about the friends I’ve lost and I still cry when someone hurts my feelings or my friends’ feelings or my kids’ feelings. Damn, I cry a lot.

I thought in my 40’s my kids would be in their 20’s or at least their teens, but they’re not. They’re 5 and 3 and I don’t regret that at all.

I thought in my 40’s that I’d be done with beer and nachos and dance thumper, but I’m not and I hope I’m never done with those things because you know what, they’re fun, although I never realized this in my youth, old people deserve fun, too.

I thought in my 40’s that my kids would have cousins with my bloodline and that we’d all do stuff together. And the fact that it isn’t that way sucks.

I thought in my 40’s I’d be Jay McInerney or Kelly Ripa. I’m neither. Yet.

Being in my 40’s is not what I thought it would be, but nothing ever is, right?

The way I look at aging, it’s not being older that’s hard because, although I may make jokes about it, I really don’t care about my age. For me, it’s more about the fact that in order to reach 41, I’ve had to live through 40 years of all the crap life throws at us. And while there are certainly so many wonderful things I’ve been given, there are also countless days you couldn’t pay me to live through again.

In order to make it into our twilight years, we have to be resilient enough to push through the hard years and enjoy the good ones.

As Bette Davis, of the famous eyes, once said “Old age ain’t no place for sissies”.

I’ve been called a lot of things in my life but sissy has never been one of them.
So bring on the next the 40-some years. Hell, make it 50, 60 even. Put me on a jar of smuckers. I can take it.

Happy Birthday, Pat Noel

An old friend of mine turns 40 today. I met Pat Noel in 1979, which means I have know him during every decade that we’ve both been alive and that’s pretty important to me. Why?
Well, because for most people it’s their family who loves them through thick and thin, during all the unpleasant and embarrassing stages of their life and gives them the continuity that I think all of us need.

For me, the people who do that are not the people I’m related to. Those people mostly left. And the one who stayed likes to pretend there is no past which is fine because our past was hard. I’m not going to force anyone to relive it. But sometimes I think he forgets that there were some good parts. Some funny parts. Some parts that I love to remember. And for that I have Nancy and Anne, Bridget and Sylvia, and today’s birthday boy, Pat Noel.

Pat Noel came to my elementary school when I was in fourth grade. He started the year in my brother Kevin’s third grade class but after about two weeks his mom came in and told the principal that Pat needed more of a challenge so he skipped third grade and moved right up to fourth. When he entered our class everyone knew that last week he was in third grade and since he immediately kicked everyone’s asses in math, we assumed he must be some kind of genius. We were right.

He was also the best athlete anyone had ever seen. My dad constantly wanted to race him. My brother once made me call Pat in as a ringer for a soccer tournament that Kevin’s team was losing. Pat showed up and they won. It was sort of like the movie “Victory” only without Sylvester Stallone or the Nazis. In seventh grade Pat skipped playing on the 7th and 8th grade soccer team or the junior varsity team and went right to playing with juniors and seniors in high school and travelling to Norway with them for the summer. He was our hero.

But the thing about Pat that was most impressive was his superior social skills. Although a brain, he was never a nerd. Although a jock, he was never a snob. Pat took every cliché the media fed us about stereotypes and threw it out. Forget how brilliant, how athletically gifted he was – first and foremost Pat Noel was a friend. And he was a friend to everyone.

I’ve never met a person who at 40 years of age has never lost a single friend. And I don’t mean never lost a friend to a falling out, although Pat has never had one of those. I mean he’s never just lost touch with someone. He’s never considered someone “fringe” and sort of let them fall away. He has made more friends than anyone else and he has kept them all.

If you could look at a lineup of Pat’s friends you’d see the age range is mind boggling. Pat has friends who I still feel the need to call “Mr.” because they were the Dads of people I grew up with and he has friends so young that there is actually one guy who I believe still is underage…for drinking AND possibly voting.

My memories of Pat are filled with so many crazy hijinks that it would be impossible – and in some cases maybe even illegal – to list them all.

I will tell you that if you see Pat wearing a painter’s cap that says “I survived The Grizzly”, it’s a lie. At the top of the “biggest” hill of the little kid’s Scooby Doo roller coaster he yelled “We’re all going to die!” and that was the end of his thrill ride career.

I will also tell you that if you don’t know how to play the drinking game quarters and Pat offers to teach you as long as you have “two dimes and a nickel”, you better run the other way, or be prepared to end up face down in the bushes mumbling something about how your brother is “TKE at Frostburg”.

And I'll tell you that while Pat is married to a beautiful woman who he adores, his love for his guy friends borders on homosexual. Apparently they even have some sort of pact in place where they will all retire within 10 miles of one another and live out the sunset of their lives together. My friend Fissy is already working on developing a large plot of land on the Eastern Shore for this happening retirement community. Must be over 60, love soccer and be a friend of Pat Noel. I hear there is already a waiting list forming.

Patrick Noel has given me some of my best days. And he’s been there on my worst. I knew him in 1979 when he was the new kid who skipped third grade, goofed off in class and still seemed to be smarter than everyone else. I knew him in 1982 when he decided to be preppy and called himself Puffy (way before Sean Combs did). Because of him I met my most hilarious friend, Fissy, and my friend Nancy met her sexy dancer husband, Bill. I can’t even begin to imagine how much more fun the world would be if there were more Pat Noels in it. All I know is that it’s been a better place for everyone he’s touched the last 40 years.

At the end of one of my favorite movies, Stand By Me, the film’s protagonist, Gordie Lachance, now an adult and a writer, reads aloud as he types the line “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” I’ve always felt like that sort of nailed the way I feel about my childhood friends. And I’ve always known how lucky that makes me.

Happy Birthday, Old Pal.