My friend Chris claims that he loves his life. “Seriously, my life’s been great,” he told me when we met for his usual birthday party celebration among old high school friends – himself and me – together over a lunch or something between hours. As his sworn “study-buddy” all through five years of college and both still unmarried, the two of us are pretty close. Everyone else seemed to have drifted off somewhere and gotten married, leaving just the two of us geezers to contemplate life at the age of thirty-two.

“You say that,” I replied, “but you haven’t told me the ‘why?’ yet.” He nodded then, with that characteristic quick, cocky upwards tilt of his.

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Thank God for the television. That it exists, such an appliance, which gives purpose and meaning of life to those who use it regularly!

It is just such a device that showed me a happy Ellie last Friday, on the first day I’ve seen her since high school. She was wearing a purple polo shirt. Her usual shoulder-length black hair with bangs that had not changed for years was tied up in a purple elastic. She also wore jeans and white runners. Glancing down at my own shoes, I wondered when I stopped wearing those things.

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