I thought I would have heard from Dominic by now.  He checked out in 2016.  We did time together at Oakwood Collegiate Institute back in the Middle Ages, and kept in touch ever since.  My daughters, when they were little, used to call him “Donnamic.”  He liked that.

(To be fair to my little girls, I had a friend named “Donna.”  You can see how they would make “Donnamic” from Dominic.)

Not hearing from Donnamic means either that there is no afterlife, as he believed, or that there is an afterlife, and Donnamic is staying away because I smell of garlic.

I remember Donnamic today, June 28th, because it is his birthday.  I loved the vulgar way he greeted me:  “Gary!  How the fuck are you?”  No matter how many times he saw me, he would always greet me this way.  Sometimes he saw me two or three times in a day, or twice in an hour.  The length of the interval between the times he saw me did not matter.  Whenever he saw me he said, “Gary!  How the fuck are you?”  Of course, he never greeted me like this in mixed company.

And after he greeted me, he would tell me a joke.  He always had a joke.  He was quite the joke teller.  He had a way of spinning off jokes that made me laugh even when I had heard the joke before.

It has been four years since he left the planet for a better climate.   I am still hoping that he will appear before me, greet me in his unique way, and then tell me a joke.

 Donnamic, you old bastard, Happy Birthday!  I miss ya.