The rules of the game

Oct. 10, 1979

“I don’t go anywhere I’m not invited,” Hank told me over beers one night at the old Red Baron pub in Cedar Grove, explaining why he refused to go to the party with the members of the band, despite the fact that the girl he loved had gone. “If she wanted me to be there, she would have invited me, otherwise it hurts too much when I get there.”

At our age, I wanted to tell him, we couldn’t afford to be picky. But Hank was a social butterfly with clipped wings who would not willingly go back to the cocoon he had lived in early in life, but feared to walk into a spider web, he said, at least not without someone inviting him.

But knowing Hank as I did, and seeing him walk out the pub door that night, I knew he would go anywhere and do anything if he thought there was a chance for love at the end of it, and as it turned out, he did go, and he did get hurt, and even then, when he said he wouldn’t, I knew he would still do it again.