The Story: Now that I think of it, I’ve known Jimmy for a long, long time. I think my first recollection of him is from the very first Amoskeag Rugby prom when he was dating a girl I went to high school with. I went to that prom with Jason so it’s got to be nearly 15 years since we first met.
For a lot of years, we hung out in the same circle with the rugby crowd but we never developed a primary friendship until Andy came along.
Andy moved to New Hampshire from Cleveland about a year after we started dating. I don’t even know if he met Jim through me or just by hanging out at The Rover but they hit it off and became fast friends.
When Andy moved to NH, I was living with my parents and he just moved in there, too. I know it sounds strange, and it probably was, but it actually worked out ok. It’s a huge house and, as I’ve mentioned, I have a great relationship with my parents so it worked despite Andy sometimes feeling like Meathead from All in the Family.
While we lived there, we actually used to entertain quite a bit. This was the era when Michael lived three blocks up the street in one direction and Nikki lived five blocks away in another direction. We’d regularly have porch parties and barbeques or stumble home from downtown for post-bar munchies and thirsties.
Jimmy reminded me that, for a few years, we used to call it The Home for Wayward Thirtysomethings. It was. And we were.
The original group has all grown up and moved on, though, and there’s been another group of Wayward Thirtysomethings entertaining there for the past three years since Tim moved home post-divorce. Even that is coming to an end, though, since he and Cole will be living in a new apartment by the time this is posted.
After the heyday of The Home for Wayward Thirtysomethings, Jimmy did some cool stuff. He moved to the island of Palau for a year to work in their Senate. Then he moved to Dublin for a few months and caused a bit of an international incident when he was denied re-entry because his Visa was sitting on his boss’s desk and wasn’t in his possession.
Now he’s home again, working for a small, local law firm and thinking about business school.
Interestingly, Jim doesn’t drink any more. He realized that the way he was drinking back then (really, the way we were all drinking back then) was getting in the way of him getting what he wanted out of life and he just wasn’t enjoying it – or the scene that went with it – anymore. I really respect that and think he’s done a great job of going out and getting what he wants.
The Drink: When he heard about The Forty Drinks Project, Jim said he would make an exception for me, for history and for art and have a drink with me. It had to be at The Wild Rover, since that was pretty much our exclusive haunt at the time, and it had to be Jaegermeister, because that’s what we drank a lot of.