It can take a few mph off your fastball to find out that those, who you were subliminally thinking or assuming are still along with you on this ride of our similar physical life-journey, have left you without any warning or a note from their wife, mutual friend or significant other or even a clue that they were ill unless one of your hobbies is perusing the obituaries!
I’m not talking about peeps with friends who are blood-related, as in brothers, I mean , in my case, men who have friends culled through the years.. You probably know or have noticed that, in-general, we do not last as long as our female counterparts, due to a variety if factors like they like the telephone more than we do – which are the subject for another post. This is why I now write; to remind you to keep in touch with your buddies, maybe more than you are currently doing. You don’t have to call them and in some cases you many not want to call them, but let them know you are thinking about them and visa-versa. I sometimes send greeting cards around the holidays or if I know their birthday is neigh.
Recently, I have experienced the loss of three friends, singer Irene Cara and two men from within my inner circle, who I felt very close to, and yet we had not broken bread on the phone, texts or in-person in quite some time, only to learn that they are recently deceased…within the past year I’m talking about! I learned of the demise of the guys while writing my Christmas cards and wanting to ascertain that their address was still the same. “Shock!”
Of course my DJ mind always has a musical analogy, even if in only title. So, I implore you to, in the words of the 1982 hit dance music record by Shades Of Love, which comes to mind, “Keep In Touch, (Body To Body)” at all costs. It is a damned sad shame that with the current plethora of communication choices – phone, sms, email, paper letters and cards in the US mails – that people are not keeping touch to the point that one’s friend can die without college mates, classmates, family and neighborhood buddies knowing about it, until l-o-n-g after-the-fact.
What I profess here sounds like what our parents did – and indeed it is one of their best habits from a simpler era. One of the negative aspects of the “information superhighway” is that is has encouraged lazy, lackadaisical traditional communication of the ilk our parents taught us by-example.
As I remember my mom saying late in her years, “We are at the age when we are losing cherished people!” At least she had a circle of friends – church, and professional – always calling each other on the telephone in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.
The advent of texting and the internet has dumbed-down our collective society to the point that we do not reach-out as our predecessors did – and much to our emotional detriment at the end of the day, when you find out via Facebook, that so-and-so, your homie from around the way growing up, has been dead for a year or more, when you finally get around to thinking of them and the timely jokes they used to tell you around NFL playoff time or whenever…
So its so easy to call, leave a voice-mail, or better still, drop a note in the mail with a stamp, to let your friend know you thought of him while you still share the physical world! Who doesn’t like to receive a letter in their mailbox that isn’t a bill!?
Late last year, during my decluttering campaign, I came across a piece of paper written by a great lady I once knew, in her own handwriting. It wasn’t written to anyone in-particular insomuch as I could tell. It read, “Try to live our lives better healthier and stay in closer touch!”
Pick-hit: This post is dedicated as we used to do on the air, with brotherly love to my late colleague at WKCI (“KC101FM”), New Haven, Connecticut, “Smokin’ Willie B. Goode”, circa 1981 – 1983.
Watch the relevant video music I created, related to this song!
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