It was Bill Berry, not the former drummer for REM, but the other one.
He was trying to reconstruct how we survived two weeks we spent in Prague, Czech Republic and wrote me out of the blue.
"Wasn't that the strategy?" he asked.
"There was a strategy?" I immediately wrote back.
He hasn't responded.
It'll likely be a couple of months before I hear from him again.
He often drops out of sight for long periods of time but we have that wonderful gift of being able to instantly pick right up where we left off without skipping a beat.
"Hey Remember the time ..." I'll begin.
"Oh yeah that was funny," he'll reply before I even get to what I'm talking about.
"How in the hell do you know what I'm talking about?" I fire.
"Well," he'll say calmly, "aren't you talking about the time we moved all of the furniture out of that woman's house in Havana, Cuba so we could learn to salsa with those students that night?"
"Well, yeah," I tell him.
I don't know how he does that but he does.
Then again, Bill is always calm.
He has a spiritual center that borders on holy.
Unless Markers Mark is involved. Then he's loud!
I locked him out of the room one day in Myrtle Beach so I could get some rest. He took offense and started yelling at me through the open doors of our hotel room on the second floor.
Cussing, I stumble to the balcony and look down to see him bouncing on the diving board of swimming pool with a bottle of Makers Mark. He's trying to speak in Hebrew which we'd both taken in Seminary but it's coming out all slurred.
"SHTOK!" I yell telling him to shut up.
He stopped bouncing and considered what I'd said before bouncing again and screaming "Ani yiv-at lecha ba beitsim!"
Shaking my head, both hands covered my crotch I close the sliding glass doors and went to sleep.
When I woke up, he's asleep in the bathtub.
I have no idea how he got inside the room.
Hoo-boy! The adventures we've had!
But he's always available in a heartbeat if I need him. We have long thoughtful talks when we're not pushing one another to do things neither would ever consider by ourselves. We've helped one another through our worse while having the most incredible of adventures. Honestly, I don't know what my life would be without him. It certainly wouldn't have been as much fun.
He's pretty mellow these days and he often drops out of sight for long periods of time.
Well, unless he's with me.
Then we make our own heaven in spite of whatever hell there may be.
