After ten days away from the office, I’m heading back in this morning. Luckily, it’s a short week—just today, tomorrow, and half of Wednesday before the long Thanksgiving weekend begins. I’m definitely looking forward to the extra time off.

It should also be a pretty peaceful week at the museum. My boss is out on vacation all week, and my other coworker has her office tucked away elsewhere in the building. So for the most part, I’ll have my little corner of the museum to myself. Honestly, I’m hoping for quiet days and easy work.

You may notice that my posts this week might have a slightly maudlin tone. It’s not because I’m spending Thanksgiving in Vermont or because my birthday is coming up. It’s because this time of year always brings a familiar sadness: a friend of mine won’t be celebrating another birthday. It’s been ten years, and I still miss him. Grief has a way of slipping into the rhythm of the holidays.

Every year, for my birthday, I go out to dinner with a close friend. We always share a bottle of wine at our favorite restaurant—at least, we used to. This year will be different. My liver no longer allows alcohol, but that’s alright. We’ll still have dinner on Friday, and afterward we’re planning to visit a holiday lights festival at a big outdoor museum near Burlington. It should be beautiful, and I think a little beauty will do my heart some good.

People always ask if I’m going home for Thanksgiving, and the answer is always no. I can’t afford two plane trips a month apart, and even if I could, I’m not especially eager to spend my birthday week in Alabama—or worse, fly back to Vermont on my actual birthday. I’d rather spend the day with Isabella, curled up in the quiet warmth of my Vermont home. Yes, home. My parents hate when I say that, but I’ve been here ten years now. Unless something tragic forces me back, Alabama will never be home again. It’s where my family lives, but Vermont is where I live.

Have a wonderful week, everyone. May it be gentle.

Every now and then a picture pops up online that sends your mind wandering down the oddest memory lane. I came across this picture earlier—just a very handsome, very naked man lining up a pool shot—and for whatever reason, it sent my mind spinning backward about twenty years to the first time someone ever taught me how to play pool.

Back in grad school, I had one of those unexpected friendships that just sort of ignite out of nowhere. He was a very straight, very frat-bro guy from Illinois. We met at the annual graduate welcome party at a professor’s lake house—the kind of event that involved a keg, mismatched lawn chairs, and a lot of awkward introductions. Somehow he and I started talking, and before I knew it, we were back at his apartment drinking on his balcony until dawn.

Too bad he was so straight—genuinely, hopelessly straight—because we could have had a great deal of fun together. And yes, I’m speaking from evidence. He was the kind of guy who talked a big game about his 9.5” dick and then casually proved it, not out of flirtation, but because frat boys operate on a completely different plane of shameless bravado. It was, I must admit, an impressive sight.

We became inseparable. Friday nights were for bar-hopping, poker with other grad students, or just whatever chaos the week produced. He technically had a girlfriend back in Illinois, but that didn’t stop him from sleeping with half the women he came across. She found it hilarious that her straight-as-an-arrow frat bro boyfriend’s best friend in Mississippi was gay. She always said he’d come home to her in the end, and she was right. They eventually got married, and to my knowledge, he never strayed again once they were living in the same city. But those Mississippi years? He was a horny little bastard. Weren’t we all when we were in our twenties.

One night in 2005—my birthday, I think—we ended up at a bar we almost never went to, one of those places with an almost perfect half-and-half mix of straights and gays. I can’t remember the name, but I could still drive you to it.

That night, he decided he was going to teach me to play pool.

Now, I was terrible at pool. Abysmal. So he stepped behind me, pressed his body against mine, and guided me into the proper position—very much like the pose in the picture above, though in our version everyone kept their clothes on. For him, there was absolutely nothing sexual about it. For me…well, it was one of the more pleasant lessons I’ve ever received. And honestly, I did get better at pool after that night.

Somewhere in the mix, we ended up playing pool with two girls who I’m pretty sure were on the university’s softball team — definitely not the stereotypical “lesbian softball players” people love to joke about. One of them came back to his apartment with us and was very clearly hoping for a threesome. To my eternal regret, I figured it out a little too late, mostly because I had drunk way too much. I got sick, passed out on the couch, and fell asleep to the soundtrack of the two of them having sex. I woke up to round two the next morning before she cheerfully said goodbye to me on her way out.

Those were my “wilder days,” though in truth I was never that wild. I was still a very serious student. It was simply the first time in my life I’d had real freedom—living three hours from my family, coming out, navigating grad school, rebuilding life after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the house I’d been living in, and having to move into the dorms for a semester because my town was overrun by Katrina refugees and housing was at a premium and in short supply.

Another morning, I woke up in his bed with a female professor lying between us. Nothing had happened; none of us had hooked up. But the way she woke—going from dead asleep to standing at the foot of the bed in one swift, acrobatic motion—is a sight I’ll never forget.

A lot of people didn’t like him. He could be an intellectual snob, and he was proud of it. For some reason, he thought I was the only person in our grad program smarter than he was. That’s not true, there were other people smarter than him. But he was a loyal friend to me during a very chaotic time in my life, when a lot of people I thought were friends turned out not to be such good friends. After his two years in Mississippi, he went back to Illinois, got a master’s in library science, followed his girlfriend to Texas for a job at a major oil company—she was a biochemist, and he eventually became the oil company’s corporate librarian—something I didn’t even know existed. Last I checked, he’d gone on to law school and was working as an attorney for the same big oil company.

We eventually drifted apart, as people do. But him teaching me to play pool—pressed behind me, bending me over just right, guiding my hands—remains one of my fondest and most vivid memories.

Funny how a single picture can open a door you didn’t even realize was still there. If this sparks a memory of your own — a friend, a night out, or a moment that caught you off guard — don’t be shy. Share in the comments. I always love reading your stories, and I know other readers will enjoy them too.