Human Canonball

During freshmen year of college, a lot of my friends from high school became devastated that a lot of their "friends" from high school weren't keeping in touch with them. I tried to explain to them that sitting next to someone in a class and getting along with them does not count as a friendship. This would usually get my friends pretty bent out of shape. "Are you saying that this friendship was fake?! We had so many deep conversations!" I would respond by telling them that if they weren't having these deep conversations outside of class, they were merely acquaintances, or (gasp) just classmates. This usually just added to the betrayal that my friends felt, but I thought it'd be better that they hear it from me than waste hours trying to hunt down people that were just "classmates". People just lose touch. It's a fact of life. I wasn't trying to be a downer. I even suffered this same betrayal after college. Even with the technological advancements in recent years like Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, and e-mail, people have still found a way to not keep in touch. It's almost harder not to keep in contact with someone than it is to keep in contact with them.

My friendship with Bruce (BFF!) is kind of anomaly. Not only have we kept in contact despite being in different states for the past 16 years (California for me, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New Jersey for him), we didn't live that close to each other when we both lived in Minnesota. We didn't live in the same neighborhood, not even the same school district. So while most kids see their friends every day at school, and often after school as well, I saw Bruce on Sundays at church and sometimes that was it. Occasionally I would go to his house after church or vice versa but there were never any spontaneous "Hey are you done with your homework? Come on over!" phone calls since it wasn't worth it to our parents to drive us over and pick us up after only a couple of hours.

When we did get to go over to someone's house, we usually got a pretty substantial amount of time to wreak havoc. Usually this consisted of a lot of video game playing. There were other toys (train sets, Transformers), but typically we were more interested in Tetris and Rampage. Occasionally we'd wander outside but once the sun went down, we were usually crowded around the Nintendo. Dinner would be served and then the parents would come to pick us up. We learned that we could buy a couple extra hours of play time if we could convince the arriving parents to stay for tea. This was a gesture offered every time, and almost without fail, we were able to get our couple of extra hours.

At one point, my Nintendo started acting up to the point where it was kind of hit or miss whether it would work. This caused me to later "upgrade" to a Sega Genesis (hindsight doesn't necessarily agree with that). This problem caused us to be creative and come up with an alternate activity that we could do if the Nintendo wasn't working. We came up with something that we called Human Canonball. It was an activity that consisted of jumping off a ledge in my room, trampolining onto my bed, and then into a pile of pillows onto the ground. Bruce recalls this as being terrifying, but if he was truly terrified, he definitely wasn't against participating. Not once did someone get hurt, which is probably quite incredible with the amount of danger involved. We were like 8, so we didn't really think about any potential ramifications.

For some reason, I never introduced Human Canonball to any of my other friends. Perhaps it's because my other friends and I would play sports and wouldn't need to find some mindlessly dangerous activity to kill time. All I know is that I never invented anything like Human Canonball with any of my friends from school. This is not to say that they weren't as smart as Bruce or that I didn't have fun with them. I had a lot of fun with my neighborhood chums, but some reason I just slowly started losing touch with them when I left Minnesota. It definitely stung, these people that I used to see everyday, were no longer in my life at all, not even by snail mail. I'm not even sure many of them would remember who I was if I showed up at their door and introduced myself. I probably spent a lot more time with them but perhaps Bruce and I were just much more efficient. We had inside jokes (tea!), a game we invented, and we shared many many meals of great Korean cooking together. Maybe the cliché is right. It's not about quantity of time as it is quality of time. We've had plenty of great memories, and luckily at least once of us remembers it all.