More congratulations are in order
Our good friend fritza is making yet another addition to his family. Sometime in late July, there'll be another little fritza running around. New life is the universe's ultimate miracle. It'll be good to have another one among us.

I have very few longtime friends with whom I've maintained contact. I met Fritz in 1980, in seventh grade (Mrs. Blood's science class, as I recall. What a great name for a science teacher.) In school, Fritz and I were misfits; in very different ways, of course, but misfits nevertheless. We have stories to tell, but the stories are much better told over a beer or a strawberry daiquiri made with 151-proof Bacardi ("No smoking around the drinks, please. Thank you.") It's good to share stories with the only other person who'd get the joke.

Our late teenage years were spent fishing, drinking, going to school occasionally, fishing, and drinking. Our weekends usually started at the crack of dawn on Saturday, with a map of Missouri, some weak fishing equipment, some illicit booze; basically everything but a plan. They usually ended with some great discovery having been made and another great story to tell.

As all common paths eventually do, ours diverged after college. He got married three years after I did and moved to Kansas City a few months before I moved to Cincinnati. We've never met each other's children; we haven't taken our sons fishing the way we always said we would; and, frankly, I haven't kept in touch as well as I should. As one of our charter readers, he's done a pretty good job keeping up with my life, but I haven't done as well as I should keeping up with his.

Thankfully, a real friend doesn't hold that against me.