I’d heard a day or two before that he’d be there.
I hadn’t seen Jon Keene for a year or two and inwardly I promised myself that on Christmas Eve I’d stop at a bar where he was going to be and tell him I loved him.
So somewhere during the last-minute shopping, searching for presents long since gone and trying vainly to remember who ought to get what, I went to a bar I’d never visited before and searched out Jon Keene.
Now long before Jon went to to work at Budweiser in Nashville, he was a football coach and back then I was a sports writer. We must have walked a mile or two of sidelines together and, Lordy, growing up like we did it seemed like we knew the whole world.
But life often leads in different paths and we went our separate ways. Like I said, we hadn’t seen one another in quite a while and when I pulled my car into Bud’s it was as though the best spot in the lot suddenly appeared and I was in.
I’d never been inside the place, and I had to search, but there he was, nestled up in a booth, and we hugged one another like grown men do before ordering up some beer.
Jon had been there a while so I told the girl to bring me two, still planning to stay only for five or 10 minutes, but the sweet bliss that men who drink beer in the afternoons know only too well took a hold tighter than the girls who once stole my heart and another round turned to three.
Jon was there to watch the Titans, but soon we were caught up in Indianapolis, the Steelers, New England and the Ravens.
Better still, we talked about our kids and people who had just died. We remembered our enemies, those who had done us wrong, and we talked about our friends who have done well, about those who had touched our past and gone on to greater things.
Most of all, we laughed.
There is a lilt to the laughter in a crowded bar on a Sunday afternoon that is incomparable, but when you stir in Christmas Eve and lifelong friendship it reaches a greater pitch that can rarely be equaled.
Well, we talked on, about important things like what to do when you have a runner on first and second and you’re facing the top of the order, and we winced as the Titans fell behind while the Colts, and Peyton were losing a heartbreaker.
Thankfully, the girl kept bringing beer, and it was wet and cold and wonderful, and no sooner than we mentioned one name, long buried in our brains, than another would sully forth. It seemed like we talked about everybody, never lingering on one name long, before another if like magic would appear.
Is that what Christmas is, remembering ghosts of past and present?
There we were, two older men, sitting on bar stools with our friends and acting as though there were no such things as Iraq, health care or Greenpeace. Here we were, with football games going everywhere, and all in the world that mattered one whit was the laughter, and oh we did laugh.
Who would get what presents didn’t enter the thought process and what we’d wear to church later in the night wasn’t a burden. I’m talking about two guys who hadn’t seen one another in darn near forever sitting and drinking beer and laughing.
Is there a Santa Claus?
Maybe… the Titans just won.
Well it went on, on until that little flag that is imbedded deep within the back of an older man’s brain popped up and signaled a flashback of the highway patrol commercial with that mean-looking female state trooper, the one whose T-shirt rides over the top of her blouse to her adam’s apple, and it was time to go.
That, and the dogs needed to be fed.
So a blessed afternoon closed, this one a Christmas Eve where, for an hour or two, all the pressures and all the hopes and all the telephones and all the red lights were swept aside by the laughter and the memories and the love of two old friends.
By the time the car got headed down the road the stores had closed, traffic was lulled, dark was closing in and all that was in the distance was tomorrow morning, the most blessed day of the year.
Oh, that every Sunday afternoon could be so pure, with laughter and beer and a lifelong friend, with the biggest prospect on the horizon being Christmas itself.
Roy Exum
Lookout Mountain, Tn.
royexum@aol.com