I am still basking in the glow of my weekend in Nashville, and I marvel at this group of people I was privileged to hang out with. They are all former students from Parochial College in Alabama, and despite the limitations of that little college, they took from it what they could and made their lives full and fun. Besides their maturity and good will, what strikes me most is that they are still engaging the issues we talked about in classes those years ago. It is almost as if we had a long class last weekend, only we added a wedding and bowling. We actually picked up specific conversations that had begun in particular classes from Parochial College and continued them. At one point, Jon asked me if I remembered George. I said I didn’t. He said “Yeah, he sat on the east side of the classroom about four seats back, and when you said x he said y.” “Really?” I asked, genuinely surprised that Jon had remembered this. But he did and could recite entire conversations from the classes. Jon is especially funny because he was a business major, but he never went to his business classes. He ended up hanging out in my classes and participating in the discussions. If he had credit for attending my classes, he would have a graduate degree by now.

But I know why Jonathan came to my classes: his friends were there, including the intelligent and compassionate Mechelle, who would later become his wife and at whose house we could crash over the weekend. I can still see Mechelle’s face looking up earnestly as we were discussing some thorny theological or ethical issue. She has an acute sense of justice that is tempered with empathy, and it makes her a beautiful person who lives in the difficult area between those two virtues. She has my deepest respect, and we had yet another good but difficult talk last weekend about living with loss and finding belief in a world without mercy but also with hope. Joy Harjo: “Help us not to give up and this land of nightmares that is also a land of miracles.”

Brian was there to play the music. A brilliant musician, he is also now a father and takes great pride in his role. He is absolutely convinced that Asher is the best looking child on the planet, and he may be right. He readily acknowledges that Asher’s good fortune comes from his mother, not him, and he beams as he introduces me to him. I actually spent a lot of time with Brian as we waited in the shade while the photos were taken. Then when it was time to go to the reception, Brian said the restaurant was east. We walked across Centennial Park to come out on West End and no restaurant. I whipped out the iPhone and discovered that we had, in suits and ties, walked across the width of Centennial Park on a hot October day in the wrong direction. But the opportunity gave us even more time to talk, and it was good. We spoke of life and choices, of beauty and meaning, of guitars and cities. I felt like I was walking with an old friend, and I guess I was because I learned that he is thirty-two. Jesus, you’re old Brian.

Valerie, the bride, is a smart ass. She takes great pleasure in this and is frankly quite good at it. I decided not to mention this in the vows because everyone knows it and loves her for it, so it would be redundant. When I moved from the Philosophy and Religion Department at Parochial College to chair the English Department, I became Valerie’s advisor because she was an English major. She was immediately suspicious, and her first words to me were “Can you explain why you’re now my advisor?” She had a number of classes with me, and I never convinced her that I am a real English teacher. Maybe I”m not. But if you get to know her, you know that she kids the people she loves, so I guess she loves me a lot. Seriously, she is one of the best readers I know and has a giant heart to go along with her native intelligence. And she’s married to Nate who helps her be nicer. Just don’t ever say “Flower box” to her.

Lane, who has a girl’s name, is my brother, my comrade, my good friend. He can drink you under the table or debate Puritan theology with you, and he can do both at the same time if you want. He can talk equally convincingly about the differences between ninjas and pirates or the emergent church in the age of the Internet. We have known each other since the first stories were ever told around a fire, and we will see each other in the next world as well. I’ll probably have to buy him a beer there.

St. Mary of Boston. I’ve written about her before. A force of nature, brilliant, beautiful, and bold, St. Mary is also a little obsessive. Jonathan downloaded iBowl on her iPhone, and she spent the entire afternoon of the wedding day ignoring estate law and playing this bowling game. She convinced herself that she could actually spin the ball, and we all watched her put imaginary english on the throw as she held her iPhone with two hands. Reports were made on every strike and spare, and we were all told repeatedly of her brilliance at bowling. But the best part of the evening was when Mechelle downloaded the game on her iPhone (it was also an Apple weekend) and immediately racked up a score of 262. Mary and I thought this was a fluke, beginners luck, a bug in the program. We had been hoodwinked, bamboozled. We hadn’t landed on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had landed on us. It was just plain wrong. Meanwhile, I couldn’t break 160 on this stupid game, so I suggested that we go to an actual bowling lane. We did. The wedding party in Nashville on a Saturday evening. It was on. St. Mary found that actual bowling was quite a different thing from holding a button on an iPhone, and she got served pretty good. That only made her want to iBowl more, though, and all the way back to Coolville, I received emails from St. Mary with her newer, higher scores. The last one was prefaced, “Not to be a jerk, but . . .” Uh huh.

So this is the song of my friends, my former students with emphasis on the former. I came back to Coolville refreshed in a way that I had not felt in some time, and grateful that I have these people in my life. I myself am good fortune, but it helps to have good people in your life who love and respect you. So my friends (Insert John McCain gesture here, blink rapidly, smirk accordingly), I miss you already, but thank you for a great weekend. Because “to be with those I like is enough,” and I like you all so much. I am happy to call you friends.