Portrait of a friendship.

Friendships enrich and nourish us. We all know that. Some friendships last for years,lifetimes really, or can be short lived. A good friend of mine, one I have known since the third grade. He's more like a brother. But he lives in Iowa.

He's surrounded by corn and flat land. It's a long way from New Jersey ,where we both are from and Massachusetts ,where he lived before Iowa. I shall call him for the purposes of this post as

"Iowa Bob".

Iowa Bob is an artist. He uses too much pastel colors, used to be really good at drawing, and fancies him as an en plein air painter. Which means if he can drive his car to the spot, he won't paint. So he sits in Iowa dreaming of dreamy landscapes, and trying to paint dreamy landscapes.

This is all a good natured ribbing. His work is beautiful, and is a joy to see. But I have to be hard on him. Demoralize, tear down his view of himself. Push him to try hard. (and believe me Rob, you need to try harder, your work is lacking any emotion, you better go back to generic food labels).

I could needle him about Big Foot and ivory-billed woodpeckers being one and the same. Just push him a little further. It's what I do for him.

He really should give up, gather his family around and curl into a fetal ball and quietly sob. And squeal like a pig, little man.

I have a collection of his discards. He knows the ones, the ones he left at my house, hoping they would never resurface. Perhaps I'll post them here as a slideshow. Yes, perhaps...