I hope I don’t get booted out of the Man Club for treasonous acts and disclosure of Club secrets for the story I’m about to relate, but...
My friend JS and I were talking on the phone the other day. He and I have been Guy Friends for over 30 years, getting to know one-another during our now long-ago days as competitive runners in Ohio when JS, a few other guys and I would go out for long training runs on roads in the quiet Ohio countryside. JS still lives in Ohio but he visits me occasionally here in the Pacific Northwest and we go for backpack hikes, or we climb mountains, or hit the roads for kick-ass bike rides.
There’s a bond that forms among friends who run or cycle miles and miles together and who share rambling, honest conversation, and the same sweaty bond happens on a mountain trail. JS and I have a kind of Sweat Brotherhood.
I must confess too that a part of the Brotherhood Thing is that there are occasions when we break into a kind of Guy Lingo: We time-travel back to junior high...and no matter how educated or well-read we might like to think we have become over the years, we Sweat Brothers sometimes find that we're communicating today like we did back in seventh grade (I hasten to add that it might well be a Man Secret that we speak this way, so don’t tell anyone.)
As JS and I talked on the phone, I couldn’t keep myself from bragging to him how unseasonably warm it’s been here and what great bike rides I’ve been having. As I gushed about the weather, I was fully aware that it’s cold and snowy in Ohio and poor JS isn’t getting out for any rides. His reply was exactly, to-the-word, what I knew it would be. In fact it was what I would have said to him, had weather been good in Ohio but bad here, and had JS been telling me about fun rides he was doing while I sat indoors.
“Bite Me,” JS said. And for a brief, beautiful moment, JS and I were back in junior high.
