I guess he was a charmer, although I’d never considered it.  Stacy charmed his way into my sandbox  when we were toddlers, and we stayed friends for a decade plus thereafter, until the confusion of puberty stepped in.  I remember one day, standing on my parents’ front porch, and he raised his arm and had a whole armpit full of hair I’d never seen before.  I remember when he came to ask me to play one day and I was shaving my legs instead.  And because our hormones didn’t take over in a way that made us gaze at each other with suddenly starry eyes, we just drifted off in different directions.  I eventually did decide he was a potential love interest, and I think he decided I was weird for thinking so.  That was no different than most of my crushes, and I moved on and we never spoke of it.

Our families stayed friends, so we weren’t completely out of touch.  Stacy would come home to North Carolina for holidays, graduations, and funerals and I was always glad to see him, but we never reconnected as individuals.  We just saw each other peripherally, because other people who were really important to us – usually his family – created events where we might all be together.  And I was glad for social media, where I got to know Stacy in his habitat.  Stacy loved the beach and invited people to join him there often.  Stacy loved working out and had gotten into really good shape.  (He actually took one of my birthday posts and used a photo of him and me as a “before” picture.)  Stacy worked in a restaurant and would post invitations for people to come there.  I love to eat out.  It’s too bad I didn’t live nearby so I could visit him at work on a regular basis and sit under a big umbrella on the beach, avoiding the sun (I burn) and hiding under a cover-up (because I do not care for working out and that + my love of dining out = you know).  I imagine Stacy enjoyed the sun, tanning and showing off his muscles.

I imagine a lot about Stacy, because I really didn’t know him in recent years.  We went to school together until the early 90s and saw each other infrequently thereafter.  He lived in Florida when he died unexpectedly earlier this month at age 42.  Today is his 43rd birthday.  I keep contemplating digging out all of my childhood journals and scouring them for every memory I recorded involving him – but that’s an awful lot of living in the past, even for me.  Stacy came to probably all of my birthday parties before the dreaded body hair awkwardness events sent us in opposite directions.  He hated coconut cake, which was what I had every year, but I think at some point I may have gotten Mom to make two cakes out of consideration for my coconut-hating guests.  We played baseball in the front yard with other neighborhood kids.  Stacy and Jeff were so good from playing on a team, they would hit one-handed to give us girls a better chance.  I think Stacy played G.I. Joe with Jeff and me (or I played with them).  Stacy and I had birthdays that were 10 days apart.  I remember that at some point, Stacy had crazy carpet in his room that was square carpet tiles with different colors or letters or numbers or something.  I had never seen anything like it.  I had boring shag rust-colored carpet.

When one of my parents died, someone sent a plant in sympathy.  I posted a photo of the plant on Facebook and asked what it was.  Stacy told me it was called Crown of Thorns.  That’s when I learned that Stacy knew plants.  I call the Crown of Thorns Stacy’s plant now.  I sat at Stacy’s “service of celebration and remembrance” today and listened to stories about someone I really didn’t know despite having known him almost my entire life.  And yet, although the details were new to me – the specific facts about Stacy’s life – the character they described matched very much with someone I always knew.  He was a fighter.  Sometimes we fought as kids, because that’s what kids do.  But in that fight was also passion and self-preservation, and people who knew him better than I did later in life saw those traits keep him alive and serve him well in his career and his relationships.  Stacy was well-liked and a hard worker, a professional.  He was honest, caring, and kind.  He liked animals, and people, and nature.

I wanted to know adult Stacy.  I won’t say I didn’t try.  But there were decades and states between us.  One of the lessons his father gave at the service today is to let people know you care about them.  Not tomorrow – NOW.  Who says you’ll get tomorrow?  Look, if I had Stacy back and told him everything I am writing here, he would probably block me and ask his family to quit inviting me to things.  But what I should have done is been more direct.  When I casually tried to see him when he was in town and he was busy doing other things, I should not have taken life for granted.  I hoped he would move back here and I could ease my way back into his life.  It never happened.  I should have asked for a chance.  I should have said, “Hey, in case I don’t make it clear, you’re pretty important to me.  I know we barely know each other now, and I’d like to change that.  Maybe we find out we have nothing in common, or maybe we remember why we spent so much time together for most of our formative years.  Breakfast?  Lunch?  Dinner?  A snack?  What do you have time for?  I have time for you.”

Because today my friend is gone.  Really, truly gone from my physical life from here on out.  And all I have is this blog it took me weeks to write because it was hard to form words about someone wonderful whom I used to know and still love very much.  If you’re reading this – it’s your turn.  Who will you miss if tomorrow is stolen from you?