(this one was written with some Thumpa-help, to be honest.)

The oldest two have been grounded this week; while arguing is not forbidden here, getting physical is, and I walked in just as Rachel tried to kick Alex in the groin and as he blocked the kick and shoved her back. I don't care what the fight was about; I care that they struck out at each other. So their first week of summer vacation was spent grounded.

They were pissed off for the first day, but settled into the fact that they weren't going anywhere they wanted to go and they weren't texting, emailing, or talking on Facebook with their friends. They each got one text to let Stephanie and Seth know that they would be out of touch for the week, but that was it. The only way out of the house was with a parent, and any incoming phone calls resulted in Char or me taking messages.

I have to admit, they were pretty well behaved for a couple of grounded teens, and the level of drama in this house was fairly low for the entire week. But with the sheer amount of time that they had, without the distractions for friends and homework, when boredom set in they started paying attention to their parents, and they started asking questions.

Several nights ago Kevin spent the night with Brad, and the other two decided they wanted to play board games with us. Scrabble. I don't relish this game with Alex, because he wins every time I wind up feeling a little bit stupid for the difference in his and my vocabulary. That night was no different; he played the board like a master and created words that I was sure were made up but weren't.

On the other hand, I know I'm going to lose to him, so I tend to relax and just let it happen; when I relaxed, so do the kids, and they start talking. We got to hear about that last week of school, the fun injected into classes after the exams were over, and the friends who wouldn't be returning to school next year because they were either moving or transferring to public schools.

Eventually, they wanted to know about the friends we had when we were growing up. Were we still friends? Did we keep in touch? And since then I've been thinking a lot about high school and the people who mattered.

The reality is that I only keep in touch with one person from my youth. There would be two, but the person I connected with the strongest, and who was my best friend from eighth grade on, died when I was 20 years old. For a long time I was sure that my first born son would be named after him, until the time came to actually ponder baby names and the only other person from those days convinced me he would have hated that.

Anyway, the kids wanted to know about him. What he was like, why we were friends. Did I think we would still be friends even today? Would they have liked him? Did I still miss him?

Yes.

Truth be told, it's not as if I think about him every day. I still miss him, but it's been 29 years and the pain of losing my best friend has faded from sharp to wistful. I don't doubt that we would still be friends today; I strongly suspect that he would have followed the same paths I took in life, although he came weighed down with a lot more baggage.

As the kids picked my brain about him, I realized that his life was a good lesson for them. He represents the sharp divide between having been loved and searching for love. He was adrift in his own family, virtually abandoned to raising himself, and because of it, he made choices that he otherwise wouldn't have.

In intellect, Alex reminds me a lot of him. By our junior year he was emancipated from his parents and living in the dorms at a local university, having graduated early. But he ached for family, and what he couldn't have by right, he tried to create. When he was sixteen, newly emancipated, he got his sometimes-girlfriend pregnant, and in trying to do what was right, he married her.

Yeah, at sixteen.

He wasn't in love, but he wasn't going to walk away from his child, not after having been left behind by his own parents. But he was just sixteen, and struggled. He dropped out of school and scrambled for jobs that didn't pay enough for rent let alone food for his new family. He lived on adrenaline and the generosity of his friends' parents.

Even so, he had a future. He hit bottom and was climbing his way back up with a job that gave some relief, and after the birth of his son he was offered a scholarship. There was hope.

And then there was a horrific car wreck that ripped his family from him. Where he wasn't in love when he got married, he did love his young wife, and his son was like breath to him. He was seventeen years old, and lost everything.

He could have given up, but after nearly a year of agony, during which he had hidden himself away from life so well that we all really did think he'd gone off somewhere to die, he resurfaced, determined to live. He still wanted what he had been cheated out of twice, he wanted a family. He wanted to grow up more, finish school, get the golden job, and then find someone.

When I started college, he transferred and had stepped onto that path with me; we had the same terms to our scholarships and the promise of post-college emoployment. By my sophomore year, his junior, he had solid plans. He knew what he wanted, and he was pretty sure how he wanted to get it. And an idea of with whom.

We were nineteen, and we had everything to look forward to.

He was nineteen, and he felt a lump. And he ignored it. He never mentioned it to anyone, not until it was of a size that was so uncomfortable that he had to tell someone. He went to my father first, and didn't fight it when my mother dragged him off to see a doctor.

Nineteen. He'd been abandoned by his parents, married, fathered a child, been widowed and had his son ripped from his life, and he was suddenly looking at a diagnosis that gave him only six more months to live.

If he had paid attention to that lump and asked for help early on, he would probably be alive today, because even then testicular cancer had a high cure rate.

I do think of him often enough that the unfairness of his life stings; He died when he was just twenty, and his son should have been three and a half. But I also don't think of him often enough that when I do, I feel a little guilty. He wanted what I have; he deserved what I have.

None of that even comes close to saying why we were friends, and the kids are still picking my brain about him, looking for stories about why we were friends and what we did to get into trouble together.

But where things fell short for him, that's what I've been thinking about.

I want the kids to grasp how much promise he had, and how a few bad choices made getting anywhere hard as hell, and I want them to see how hard it was for him to get to the few places he was able, and how horribly things can go wrong. Because when you're sixteen and you crave love that badly, you just don't see how anything can go wrong.