As I’ve been doing my little profile series this year, it’s been fun to consider the plot of each friendship. In some cases I met friends and started hanging out immediately. With others we were acquaintances for years before having any meaningful interaction. I’ve known one of my regular “gym friends” since the second grade, but we barely interacted at all between the third grade and our thirties. I met Dave during a brief stretch of my YSA days up at the University of Utah, in the heyday of the University 32nd Ward. I remember him being a highlight of the Elders Quorum instructor rotation, combining dry wit with spiritual insight, which I appreciated as a fellow teacher. We knew each other well enough to know who the other one was, but that was about the extent of it. Dave then got married, vanishing from the YSA radar, and that was it. Fast-forward a few years, and there’s Dave again, now with a family and, appropriately enough, attending my family ward. He’s still combining humor and spirituality—this time as a Sunday School teacher—but now we’re playing softball together (anyone who knows Dave knows he’s a huge baseball guy), and I’m hearing all about his exploits in documentary filmmaking. Later we’re serving in the Elders Quorum together, playing church basketball together—he favors the three-ball—and once our friendship becomes legally certified on Facebook, I learn that he’s got a knack for celebrity sharpie portraits. The moral of the story? People come in and out of our lives at unexpected times, and you never know who you might wind up meeting to eat breakfast food for lunch with someday.
When I think about it, 2008 was a lousy year in a lot of ways. By the end of it, I’d lost two grandparents, a job, and I even got kicked out of my singles ward. And like a lot of people, my investment efforts blew up in my face (at least temporarily—keep a long term perspective!). Yet for all the hassles and challenges, the best thing I remember about 2008 was my sister getting married, which officially made John my brother-in-law. By the time John married Katie, he’d already had a long history with my family. He grew up next door to my grandparents in Farmington, and had been a family friend for years before he and my sister started dating seriously. In fact, John and I were roommates for almost two years in the middle of it all. How many guys can say they lived with their future brother-in-law? For all the good times we enjoyed throwing parties and holding group dates at the house on 1200 south, and taking yearly excursions up to the cabin in Island Park, things just got better after John and Katie got married. My great roommate is a great brother-in-law, but he’s an even better husband and father, not to mention a dedicated priesthood holder, and I’ve especially enjoyed being a part of the family he and Katie are building (even if that means letting him choose a new and risky option for his birthday dinner every year). They gave me something to pin my hopes on back in 2008, and have continued to deliver ever since.
Whenever I have Ben on my lunch schedule, I know I will laugh. We met in the flannel-clad haze of the early 90s, slogging away bagging groceries for Dick’s Market in a kind of psycho-social high school wonderland. Teenage jobs rarely make a lot of sense, and so it was always good to have Ben around to share the madness. As I got to know Ben better, I quickly realized that he was far more than a sarcastic and quick-witted fellow bagger. He was a performer of various forms, doing musical theater and improv, and his keen taste in writing eventually convinced me to read Woody Allen for the first time. There were group dates and late night hangouts, and a memorable excursion to Yellowstone where Ben forgot to bring a sleeping bag. Eventually we moved on from Dick’s, served missions, and went to college. Ben went legit, getting married, going to law school, having a family. But we kept in touch, mostly in the form of the kind of lunches that helped to inspire this portrait project. These days our hair may be thinner (OK, pretty much gone), and our beards grayer. Ben even has a Clark Kent job for the state AG. But just like back when we spent our afternoons in red nylon aprons, I know I have a go-to man when I need a laugh and a little perspective on the madness of it all.
