cap phasing
This past weekend I was up in the good old Delaware County area, just south of Philly, my old stomping ground. I was staying at my parent’s house, of course. What made this weekend interesting enough to write about was the fact that I got to catch up with a large number of people I haven’t seen in a very long time. Some I’ve seen more recently, and others I haven’t seen in about 3 years.

So to preface things I’ll give a short synopsis of the weekends events. I got sort of a late start on Friday heading my way up to Philly, so I ended up pretty much driving in traffic and rain on and off for the first half of my drive. When I got about an hour out of Philly, on an whim (and i wanted to talk to somebody while driving) I gave Liz a call to see what she was up to this weekend. We talked for a while and it turns out she was really busy on Saturday as I was, and that maybe we should get some food on Sunday or something. Being that I was going to be headed to Howard’s on Sunday for football we initially had the idea to get dinner on my way back down through her area after the game. The idea eventually morphed, for reasons I was hungry and she hadn’t gotten dinner yet and was just leaving work, into us just meeting up for dinner when I got up in the area on Friday night. That turned out well, I hadn’t seen Liz in a month or two and it was good to hang out and talk about the things Liz and me talk about. She was tired, but she couldn’t pass up going to Bertucci’s and having an Apple Martini, as we figured out in our conversations I am an enabler of bad things like drinking, and staying up later (i.e. like 10:30 or so hehe) when she has to get up way early the next morning to head to E-town for Homecoming stuff. So we were off.

Ok so Saturday I wake up early (like 9am) and head out to Clayton to play 9 holes of golf with Howard and Brad. I haven’t seen Brad in like forever, and Howard I’ve talked to some but haven’t seen him in a while either. Who knows what we scored, it was just a good time to get out with those guys, then head back to Howard’s parents house and check up on how they’re doing.

Next on the plate I get home to find my dad and my brother had gone out to watch my cousin’s son, Brian, play some football. I got out the field and saw my cousin Jack (brain’s uncle) cheering on the game with my dad. Brian plays QB, defensive end, and he’s the team kickoff kicker. Hey all the kids play Offense and Defense, but their team has like 4 kids that are just really quick and way better than many others. One of them is my little cousin. Damn its funny to see when some little kid is just on another level compared to the people he’s playing against. Fun times my cousin’s team destroyed the team they played.

Next up for the weekend was Homecoming for Widener, my college. All of the people I knew (or a bunch) from when I did college radio were all out at homecoming to see the new WDNR studio and equipment. This is where I saw some people I hadn’t seen in years. Overall the idea was go see the new place, then get some dinner, and then the station was letting graduates do radio shows that whole weekend, so our band of misfits took the WDNR 89.5 airwaves around Chester, PA from 9pm to 12am that night. It was a blast of craziness, lots of inside jokes and such and good music. I got to meet some people I only knew about from the people I knew at the station, so it was cool. I also saw people like Dave and Stan, whom I haven’t seen since leaving college (like 3 and half years ago), its good to catch-up. Also along for the festivities were Jess, Joey and Stacy. Stacy I’ve hung out with before but never knew very well. Joey I’d just seen last month. Jess however I haven’t seen in quite a while, in fact I don’t exactly remember when I’d seen her last (some time this year maybe). We talk online or random phone calls about some computer problem she is having (yes if you’re reading don’t worry keep calling with computer problems I like the challenge).

I guess the whole Widener homecoming thing is what threw me for the most of a loop this weekend, even though the whole weekend contributed. I think it comes down to the fact that you have to realize you can never really go home. You can’t capture that thing you had before that sometimes you long for, for whatever reasons. It’s always a little earie. Its almost as if there is a ghost of those former feelings and experiences with you, but its not quite the same anymore. We’re all temporary visitors, with our own separate lives now. Its really great to recreate all of that in a little way, but in the back of your head you know we’ll all go our separate ways again at the end of the night. With some it’s that we just don’t live as close anymore. With other people it’s that you’re both different people now, then you once were.

With that it leads me into Sunday. Sunday was football day. I picked up Tony and headed up to Howard’s new place to watch the Eagles game. This was a good time, and great to see Howard for the second time in the weekend. Still with the theme of trying to get things back that were once so easy, this was another one of those. My main focus of this whole weekend was to try at some point to try and get together with groups of friends that I used to hang out with all together, almost all the time. It’s just not that easy to do anymore. Everybody’s got these plans that we need to work around, and I live out of the state so it ends up my visits up to Philly drive when these happenings might be. In the end we get people together, but sometimes only in fragmented groups. I guess it really can never be the same as it was. I guess that’s what memories are for. Still though it’s good to get everybody together every so often, just to catch up, even if it is only a fleeting moment in all of our current lives.