Next Year for Sure

What’s a song lyric that has stuck with you forever?

At the end of the upstairs hallway lies the door to the bonus room. Just looking down the hallway at it is unsettling; it’s the scene in The Shining with the two creepy twins. The walls bow out, reality flees, I hear ominous music.

It’s a huge room, it could be a really cool place to chill. Instead, it’s a graveyard of castoff junk by the family. Toys, books, busted appliances that I’m supposed to fix, boxes of old cards and letters. Cleaning it out is always on my mind.

Last week, I took another shot at it. I walked past the creepy twins and into the morass. I told myself grimly I’m not gonna leave until I clean out at least one box of cards and letters.

At first, it was easy; old Christmas cards, birthday cards, receipts and warranties “I might need someday.” Then I came to a keeper birthday card; but instead of putting it in the retain pile, I made the mistake of reading it.

It was from my friend at UF, Kip.

Hoo boy.

Kip was one of those people you naturally warm to, the kind that put you instantly at ease. I met him my first day at UF. I was sitting alone in the quad, studying the campus map, when he and three other kids came by. He broke his conversation and stopped. He looked at his friends, then me.

“Hey,” he said. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Kip.”

I shook his hand. “Hey. I’m Darryl.”

“We’re going to Baskin Robbins. You wanna come?”

I looked at him and his companions…noting two attractive girls…and didn’t hesitate. By the time we’d finished our ice cream, I knew we were going to be good friends.

He was like a brother, the guy you’d call at 3:00 am. We had our own vocabulary and assortment of inside jokes. We had long discussions about life at our favorite pub.

One passion we shared was travel, wanderlust, an itch to see what was just over the next hill. With limited funds as students, all we could do was dream, but our dreams were ambitious. Backpacking through Europe. Studying abroad. The Appalachian Trail.

But every summer, life intervened.

He wanted to be a lawyer…or, rather, he was expected to be a lawyer. His dad was a partner in a successful firm and from the time he was in middle school, his path had been set. Every summer break, he worked at his dad’s firm, while I put off backpacking in lieu of interning at IBM.

But someday, we swore. Someday.

We often studied together and usually had music playing. We had similar tastes, but our Venn diagram of favorite artists had a lot of non-intersecting space. One day, I took a Monkees album out of the sleeve and blew the dust off.

“The Monkees?” he laughed. “The Prefab Four?”

I put the album on the turntable and lowered the arm. “Just wait,” I said. “I just want you to hear this one song. It’s called Door Into Summer.”

He stopped writing as the song played. When they got to a certain lyric, he looked at me strangely. It was a curious mix of apprehension and defiance.

With his travelogues of “maybe next year” places
As a trade-in for a name upon the door
And he pays for it with years he cannot buy back with his tears
When he finds out there’s been no one keeping score

“Man,” he said. “That can never be us. No way.”

After graduation, I started my career with IBM and he joined his dad’s law practice. We both worked hard, long hours but as junior employees had little vacation time. It was a reversal of our student days when we had plenty of time, but no money.

He lived in Fort Lauderdale and I lived in Boca Raton…about 30 minutes apart… and we’d often meet after work for a few cold ones. Our discussions would invariably return to our student daydreams of well-stamped passports and George Bailey-sized luggage chests.

When I got married a few years later, Sue and I took a cruise in the Caribbean. Afterwards, Kip and I sat on the dock at a restaurant on the Intracoastal and he stared at my photographs. He flipped through them several times and then stared at me.

“When are we gonna go to Europe?” he asked quietly.

It was a question to which we both knew the answer.

One happy hour on the dock, he pinched the bridge of his nose tightly and muttered to himself.

“You OK?” I asked.

He closed his eyes and continued his pinching. “Yeah, he said. “I’ve just been getting these friggin unbelievable headaches. Sometimes things look blurry, too.”

In the weeks that followed, the headaches continued. He started to notice phantom odors and had trouble with fine motor skills. I grew alarmed as he began to see specialists.

Our meetups dropped off and he began to dodge my calls. A few weeks went by; one day his mom called and told me he was in the hospital. His voice sounded weak, scratchy and our conversation uncharacteristically lagged. “Hey,” he said after a few minutes. “I gotta go. Here’s my dad.” I don’t remember much of that conversation except for one word: glioblastoma.

I wanted to come visit him, but he begged me not to; I think he wanted me to remember him as he was. I continued to call, he sounded weaker each time; nothing was working. One day I called and the hospital operator said they didn’t have a patient by that name. Everything blurred as I hung up.

I often wonder what life would be like if he was still around. He’d probably be married, maybe a few kids; and even though we never got to be young bon vivants in Europe, sampling beer and chasing girls, hopping on and off trains, I could see us taking our families to cool places and the two of us, immensely satisfied, raising our glasses to the Glory Days at UF.

But that’s not possible and he’s been gone 35 years now.

I put the card in the keep pile, got up and closed the bonus room door behind me. No more for today.

So long, my friend. Guess we ran out of tomorrows.

© My little corner of the world 2026 | All rights reserved

Image by Meta AI