A Tale of Two Patricks
A Tale of Two Patricks 
It was the best of times, and it was the most blessed of times. Independently, I got visits from two friends named Patrick within the same week. The first was from my black friend Patrick Welch. I have other black friends but not all of them are black-black like Patrick. He is straight out of Barbados closer to Africa black. they need to throw some special light on him so that he shows up in the corporate photo because he is so black kind of black. Meanwhile, I am North American black. Even in that, I am just fried chicken-cornbread-and-collard-greens-black, not chitterlings-black-eyed-peas-and-ham-hoc-black like some of the folk down south. I met Patrick in Bible Study Fellowship, when we made up two out of three of the class members of the darker persuasion out of over 100 in the class. This is just typical of Orange County California where us persons of the darker persuasion make up the two percent that keep the milk chalky.
It wasn’t just being followers of Christ or even being black that formed a bond of brothers between us. We also happened to work in adjacent buildings at University Research Park in Irvine, though he worked for an engineering firm and I worked for UCI Psychiatry at the time. This led to us having lunch together regularly and discovering much in common. Our regular lunches continued until career moves relocated him to the San Francisco Bay Area, followed by Arizona and now Boston, but our regular conversations continued over the phone. Also, any time I happened to be anywhere close in the same state, I would give Patrick a visit; I even visited the Arizona compound.
Still the same, even with years of knowing me, he disregarded the signs at the entrance to the park that said, “Don’t feed the animals” and went ahead and bought me dinner at Telefèric Barcelona, where we enjoyed a plethora of tapas while sipping sangria. Our diner was like our many conversations over the years, characterized by lots of listening and empathizing with each other interrupted by periodic ebullition of laughter. Over the years Patrick’s wife, Laura has overheard the pattern during our phone conversations and delighted that her husband has such an interaction in his life. There was a time when I was saved from persisting in a bad relationship, in which I was being gaslighted to believe that I am a poor communicator and I don’t have friends, by remembering my conversations with Patrick. My dinner with Patrick made for quite a Wednesday night.
Then Saturday, September 29th, I had a busy agenda which included a morning rehearsal and an afternoon singing engagement for a charity event. Immediately after leaving the concert, the grand finale of the day awaited, meeting my friend Patrick Kam, accompanied by his wife Toni and son Chris. However, I did not appreciate the significance of that day until I sat down. As a matter of course, I brought Pat a present, a jar of my homemade fig jam. Still, it was not until Pat’s wife Toni leaned across the table and whispered, “Today is Pat’s birthday,” that I remembered. I had gotten so excited by the assortment of all the things on my plate that day I had forgotten; it was like I had gotten caught up with the collard greens and the cornbread and forgot that the fried chicken was the main course. This was the second time in my adult life that Pat’s wife Toni had facilitated me having a birthday dinner with my friend.
Pat was a big part of me overcoming my early deficits and reaching my current stage of life. During my undergraduate sabbatical, not part of the regular UC Davis curriculum, when I was lost in my head processing the tumult of my childhood, Pat and our other friend from high school and college, Tim Marymee, took me into Radcliff Manor for a stay while I figured things out. There Pat taught me the work-it ethic: Every day should begin by flinging wide your front door, breathing deep and inhaling the scent of opportunity because “Taylor, life is a veritable garden of opportunity; you just need to work it.” I could go on for paragraphs about “The Manor” about how my life skills were enhanced by my interaction with The Manor residents including Brain (aka Surfer B) and his then girlfriend now wife Cris, Tim aka The Stork and other ignominious sobriquets made up by Pat, and especially Pat, but that is beyond the scope of this article. 
For that evening, I hoped to focus on one of the life skills that Pat demonstrated at our American High School Wrestling Reunion a little over a year before. Pat has great active listening skills. I observed him interviewing our former teammates like he was a talk show host interviewing a celebrity being enraptured in their life story and plying them with appropriate follow-up questions. I still act out this residual of social anxiety of wherein I will fill in the silence by telling a personal story. I have flashbacks to awkward moments when I have asked questions that were too personal and killed the vibe. For that evening, I was resolved to not be that person, but instead an active listener like my friend Pat
However, I forgot a truth about me, my alcohol tolerance is at the level of one-and-done for any beverage. Somehow, I allowed our waitress to entice me into having a cocktail. Maybe I just didn’t want Chris to drink alone since he ordered a beer. Either way, I forgot that the disinhibition of alcohol instead of resolving my social anxiety only exacerbates my problem. I ended up telling too many meaningless stories, and I missed asking follow-up questions about Chris’ current film project and enquiring just what Sarah is studying in her study-abroad program. During the evening, I did manage to tell just one story that had meaning, why Pat’s brother Tim is called Mel. It seems that Chris has managed to reach college age without ever hearing that story.
It was particularly poignant to be sharing a meal with Pat; some of our best memories involve food. Some of our hardest memories involve food like lean days of cutting weight for high school wrestling and longing for it. We prefer to remember more robust well-fed times like the night during my days at the Manor, when I came back from having dinner with The Girl Next door from freshman year, aka Shamma-Shamma, as Pat called her.
Pat had carpooled to an internship in Sacramento with my good friend. She said he could be the most exasperating men, but that was only because she was disturbed by his casual driving style leaning back and palming the steering wheel with one hand as he drove. When she admonished greater caution, he did not respond with the level of alacrity, she might have desired. He always said of the Ford LTD, “We have nothing to fear because we are girded by a ton of US Steel.”
I remember coming back from dinner with The Girl Next Door with over half of the Pyrex dish filled enchiladas I had cooked to take to her. As soon as I drove into the driveway Pat and Cris came out to debrief me. That was just standard operating procedure when anyone from The Manor came home from a date. They popped in the car, and Cris made the general enquiry, “So how was your dinner with Shamma-Shamma?” Pat jumped to the standard interview question, “Did you bone?” There was no good-cop-bad-cop in this interview process because Cris joined in “Yeah, did you bone?” They both knew that my friendship with The Girl Next Door was not like that, but they had to follow the SOP. Then Pat said, “Slide over that tray of enchiladas.” They both opened the tray and began eating as Pat enquired more earnestly, “Taylor, tell us about your evening with Shamma Shamma?” We sat in my car eating enchiladas and reviewing my relationship history with The Girl Next Door for the next 30 minutes or more, a great food memory.
I felt bad that I had been too busy to cook something like a tray of enchiladas for Pat for his recent visit. I would have wanted to relive that memory in a more substantial way. After Dinner with Pat, Toni, and Chris, I went home and crashed hard on the couch, didn’t even make it to bed. However, I woke up at 4:45 am feeling quite rested. Realizing that I did have a good Pyrex dish, even bigger than the one the enchiladas were in, and some peaches from El Rancho de Escalante and blackberries, I decided I would at least make a cobbler for my friend to enjoy for breakfast. I was able to deliver the cobbler to Pat’s hotel a few hours later on my way to church. In that week, I needed the affirmation of friends, so it really was the most blessed of times. 