It was a Friday night and neither of us should have been there. I was out to dinner with a friend and, when a group of friends came to meet us, there wasn’t room for us at the restaurant – so we went next door to a dirty, dive karaoke bar. Pat was out with a group of friends for a bon voyage party for a guy from his office, but not after a great deal of vacillating about whether to even go out that night. It was the end of a long week, and he had already driven by Manchester twice that day – on the way to and from work, so driving the 20 minutes south again that day wasn’t particularly appealing, especially when the recliner was singing the siren’s song.
But there we both were, at a bar on a Friday night that neither of us had planned to be at. That’s the way it is with fate.
I talked to him first when he wandered within range of where I was sitting. (I won’t tell you the specifics; he doesn’t like my version of the story.) He was amused enough to join my friends and I, and accompanied us to the next bar…and the next, where he had me in hysterics with his air-band interpretation of Peter Cetera’s The Glory of Love (from the Karate Kid II), and the finer points of air-microphoning. I remember my cheeks and belly hurt from laughing so much.
