with the rain set in and flashes in the distance we all settle down to an old board game this is the one he always cheats at with that little smile on his face like he’s pulling one over on us and after a couple of drinks he’s the only one who really cares about it after all we’re just here for the conversation and these delightful appetizers reconstructed from an ancient Mesopotamian cookbook thought lost for at least a couple of millennia

but then the evening turns and we talk about the dark times when even finding a nickel on the sidewalk made your heart beat faster but of course we exaggerate all the old wounds for our audience even though they were all there and suffered as much or as little as we did you know you can’t really fool your friends like that then as fast as it came the storm passes though we had long ago stopped paying it any mind