So I’m sitting here conserving energy – I’ve got whatever illness has been bopping around my household. (Two nights ago, it was the missuz, last night, it was the daughter, today, it’s me.) Moving slowly, not doing work, for some reason I thought I’d look up someone I knew back in grade school. He’s got an uncommon enough name (Whitney Ciambella) that he should be findable.
No Whitney was a vague friend for a while, somewhere around 5th grade. Another student once told me “you know Whitney’s only friends with you because no one else will be friends with him. He’s using you.” But it wasn’t like folks were lining up to be friends with the school math nerd, so that seemed equiatable. He might not have been my first choice – he wasn’t the best student, he was a ruffian (relative to me, which doesn’t mean much) Whitney once used me to receive contraband – he wanted to order one of those switchblade combs advertised in the comics, and his parents wouldn’t let him have it, so he had it shipped to my place.
Anyway, the Internet does not fail me. It gives me three bits of information that I did not have. One is that Whitney was not his first name, but his middle name; I suspect he was named after his dad. The second was that he had become a roofer.
The third? He died last year, age of 46.
Tough news at any time; when one is sick and feeling extra mortal, all the worse.
