Spend The Fifteen Minutes

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Over the weekend I got to celebrate my cousin’s wedding where she and new husband danced, drank and cherished all the people there to celebrate with them as they embarked on a new chapter in life… together. 

My family is very big so it is always fun to see who’s in town, catch up and have laughs with cousins, uncles, and aunts. It was a phenomenal night. A lot of laughs and a lot of good times. However throughout the night I did have one thing keep popping up from time to time that would distract me from the beautiful views, the terrific food and the fun times. 

At one point in the night while catching up with my dad he had mentioned someone from the neighborhood had passed away unexpectedly. Now by no means was this guy my best friend, however he was someone I truly looked up to as a little kid, a teenager and even an adult. He was 5 years older than me and attended the same grammar school and high school. I think as a little kid you always remember the older kids that would look down on you and make it difficult, but more so you adore the ones who never treated you like you were beneath them. This guy was the latter. Extremely nice and extremely happy. 

As I got little older I would go to his games and watch him play like it was the NBA. When I finally reached the high school level, and our team was nationally ranked (likely thanks to all the hard work from the backups like me in practice) he would come back to check in, watch a game and say hello. 

A very random moment I’ll never forget was when my dad had a summer league team and he showed up to the game in a bucket hat over his red hair and a full cooler of beers for the postgame. It was a ridiculous look for a guy to be walking through a kids amusement center to get to the court attached but you couldn’t help but laugh when you saw his smile. 

When I finally got to be able to share a beer with him it was always resulting in laughs or a good conversation. He was the first person ever to tell me about The Miami U 30 for 30, he’d share stories of Jets tailgates, stories from when he played in high school and we’d always go back and forth on who could win the NCAA tournament. 

I worked down in Philly with a guy and through conversation of me mentioning Staten Island, he told me he went to college with my friend. He had countless stories of the lingo he would use in the dorms that made him laugh, times out together, and shared the same sentiment I did. “Nicest guy in the world.” 

I have written before about the last time you see someone, or rather how awful it is if you can’t remember the last time you see a friend, and then tragically lose them. 

I thought a lot about that this weekend at the wedding and I immediately knew when the last time I saw him was. It was within the last 2 years, oddly enough at a wake for a mutual friends mother. I had been there for a while, and was ready to say my goodbyes, pay my final respects and head home to my wife who was back home and needed help. My friend had walked in just as I was about to leave and we caught up again for 15 minutes talking about everything we could. He told me he kept up with my career and mentioned how much he enjoyed everything, he lit up when he talked about how happy he was to coach his kids in basketball even laughing at some of the mismatches he’s encountered in the AAU circuit, we talked about the old high school , mutual friends, and vowed to try to catch a game together soon. 

I was terribly sad whenever I thought about him. His young kids, his wife, his family and all his close friends who he adored. I thought a lot about our final conversation and took a little bit of a silver lining that I was able to have a final memory with him. In a way it taught me a bigger lesson I felt we could all learn from. “Take the Fifteen minutes”. 

We all have things we have to do and places we have to rush out of, the everydayness of life can blind us to just completing tasks and getting through the day. We can get lost in that struggle myself included. The one piece of advice I can try to give is to take a step back sometimes and think about the bigger picture. The laundry can wait, if you think you are going to get a head start on traffic you won’t. Rather, think about the things in that moment and let yourself be fully involved in that. Make the trek to the bar when a friend asks if you can meet up, don’t blow off dinners, call someone out of nowhere, organize an event, and most of all spend the extra fifteen minutes having a conversation with a friend you haven’t seen in a while. It could be your last. 

A life full of laughter, basketball, smiles and overall being the nicest guy in the world. A role model, a father, a husband, a brother, a son and a friend. We’ll all miss you. Thanks for the good times. 

“Fairness doesn’t govern life and death, if it did no good person would die young” - Mitch Albom