How these shenanigans begin...

My friends Theresa and Dave live across town. My son and their sons are friends, and their oldest and my boy are in Boy Scouts together. I've known them since the boys were in Cub Scouts, so we're talking about 7 years at this point. 

Dave had a medical crisis a few years ago, I won't write about what happened here just yet - I'll leave that up to Dave if he wants to share that story. Suffice to say, life is a lot different for him right now than it was say five years back. 

Before Dave's medical crisis, I "knew" him as someone on the periphery of my circle of friends or acquaintances through The Lives of Our Boys. I knew Theresa pretty well  ... but Dave was "one of the dads" on the edges of Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. The moms ran the shows in Cubs, and some of the dads stepped up to do leadership work. Dave was on the road a lot, and wasn't as involved as others.

So he was kind of .... not someone I really overlapped with. A friendly wave and smile on the way in or out a door, a nod when kids were getting picked up. That kind of thing. But I didn't know him.

After the medical crisis, Dave was left unable to travel, unable to do his job, and Theresa brought him to Boy Scout things a lot more and I got to know him much better. Sitting on the side of the room at the end of a meeting, or on a park bench while the boys ran roughshod all over fields, we got to talking about life, the universe and everything.

I found this to be a fantastic experience. Someone who had a completely different life a few months earlier was now unable to live that life, and here he was, talking to me... whereas he probably never would have talked to me like this before. 

We talked about Shakespeare and Theater, music... lots and lots of music. Dave loves music, and a lot of our favorites are overlaps (we disagree on a couple too). We talked about his life growing up, his family... and sitting still on benches while boys played we developed a pretty nice friendship. 

After a few months, Dave said something to me along the lines of being thankful that this illness happened to him, because it changed his life, and made him stop moving and see what he was missing, and that he was thankful for our friendship. It was, for me, so sad and moving to hear someone say this... and I was glad myself that it happened, or I honestly probably never would have had the opportunity to get to know him. I cried on the way home from Boy Scouts that night...

So when Theresa called on me in February to be part of Team Dave, a group of friends and caregivers who help Dave out with the basics while she is at work, I was glad to join up. I had lost my job in March of 2010, and here in the dead of stupid New England Winter 2011, I was looking for something fun to do.

Lunch got us both out of the house, and gave us the one on one time to sit and talk. And eat. And drink beer. And talk about beer. 

I started referring to these outings as "Shenanigans." "Okay Dave, what kind of shenanigans are we up to today?" I would put in my Facebook Status that I was looking forward to Shenanigans with Dave.  People that we're both friends with laugh at this. As did Dave.

For me, it's been an enriching time. Part of me doesn't want to get a full time job again (even though I've been looking hard) because I'll absolutely miss out on this. We'll take that as it comes.