Goodbye, Bearded Beernut

The Beernut and his TW, Messica.

Despite my gregarious nature, I do not make friends particularly easily. People in their mid-30s tend to have little kids running around and little spare time. And I don't much care for people.

That's kind of a joke, but really, I can count on one hand the number of friends I made in Utah who I call "middle of the night" friends. When your car breaks down in the middle of the night or your dog is missing in your neighborhood, which friend would you call? I haven't made many of those since high school.

This is my hairy leg, not helping load the UPod.

That's been due in part to my nomadic lifestyle. I've moved 17 times since I turned 18 years old. It is  hard to build bonds when you leave town every 12 months.

Making friends revolves around a little bit of happenstance. And so it was in January of 2011, when The Wife was helping out at her PA school's interviews for the incoming class of students. She met Messica, a blonde pixie from Montana. TW loved Messica's hair and took pictures with her new iPhone so she would be able to show her hairstylist what she wanted.

A few months later, The Bearded Beer Nut, Messica's husband, rolled into town. Always the sociable sort, we invited them over for dinner and drinks in May of 2011. The Beer Nut had a job interview the next day, but that didn't stop him from trying 5 or 6 fabulous Maine-brewed concoctions, including a fantastic Allagash Triple (ABV: 9%). He didn't get the job the next day.

But an easy friendship was born. I counseled Matt on what to expect as a spouse in PA school. He didn't listen, then ran into the exact same walls I ran into. I was there with the MLB Package on my TV and cold beer to console him.

There was more than just beer to the friendship, of course. We hiked a few times. He threatened to steal my dog, Daisy Duke. One night, we heard Andy Pettitte, a former New York Yankees pitcher, was going to be pitching against our Portland Sea Dogs in a minor league game. And that's how we ended up at the Sea Dogs season opener (high temperature: 45 degrees).

TW and I moved to Boston but I infamously stayed in touch with the Beer Nut and Messica. BBN came to Boston for an epic night at Fenway Park. Through two rain delays and a postgame beer at a brewery across the street from Fenway, we made it home at 1:30 a.m. -- after we stopped for Chinese food, of course.

BBN is always up for shenanigans. That's how we decided to bomb Molly Lu's phone with text messages while she was on an international trip, the idea being that when she returned to America, she'd have 200 random text messages from us. It didn't work out, but we got a great picture of BBN, featured below.

BBN and Messica spent the last few nights at our house in the guest suite. They're moving to Montana for the summer before BBN starts school at Arizona State; he's studying to become an English professor. I don't know why, but he wants to teach college students how to write. The world needs college English professors too, I suppose.

After they drove off, I got a hug from TW. I've never been on this side of the move before. Every other time I've left friends behind. It happened in Boston with our good friends who lived mere blocks from our place. It happened in Utah with a photographer whom I haven't talked to in six months. It happened other places and with other people, too. People gotta move around, sometimes.

Moving is never easy. The logistics are daunting and you become obsessed with them. It can get to the point where there's so much going on that you don't have time to feel much. But it's different on this side of things. I've got nothing better to do than feel a vague sense of loss.

Something simply had to go wrong. The past four months have been too perfect, otherwise. I got a new job at a paper I love. There were actually two jobs. I chose the town I like best. TW got a couple of jobs. We found a new house. We pulled off a move with very little loss of property or property value. If the Bearded Beer Nut and Messica had stayed, it would have been too unbelievable because life doesn't simply line up like that, even when things are going really well.

BBN and Messica are somewhere in Ohio right now, headed for Elkhart, Indiana tonight. The cell phone coverage is probably terrible and they might never read this. Which is the way it will work from now on. We won't be sharing life experiences like roadtrips and Sea Dogs games much in the future. That's just the way moving around is. I'm simply reminded how much moving sucks, only this time I realize it sucks for everybody, not just the people moving.