Do you ever have one of those days when you don't engage, you kind of just hover on the outrskirts of your normally productive life? Do you ever have one of those days when you know the other guy (or girl, or Mom, or competitor, even if these are synonymous) is doing it better, faster, and sooner than you - but you just don't care?

I had one of those days today.

Actually, I have those days more often than I care to admit. I love naps. Secret's out.

My domestic details are boring, and I have better things to write about. But today when I set my newly two-year-old daughter down for a nap, I slept right alongside her. I drifted off into sleep thinking about all of the things I wasn't getting done, the tasks and chores I was opting out of by sleeping in the daytime, so my sleep was not so 'restorative' (this is maybe why I don't sleep so well at night either, necessitating these naps - do you ever wake up at 2:00 a.m. and mentally carry over unfinished tasks from yesterday to the current day?). Yet I snuggled with my baby girl, listened to her rhythmic breathing, was tickled by her soft wavy curls, and that, my friends, represents the types of things we'll remember later when we realize guilt was a monumental waste of time.

I woke up, checked my e-mail as my daughter watched High School Musical 2 ("You Are The Music In Me" over, and over, and over, and over, damn the DVR), and I received a message  from an old friend about another friend, Orlando, 37 years old, who just had a brain aneurysm, on life support, and not expected to live. He's 37. I worked and hung out with Orlando when I was a teenager, haven't talked to him in so many years, but I thought of him often (back when crank calling was funny, he would call people randomly and assume the identity of someone named Ma Belle looking for her cows - I assure you, it was hilarious, especially when you're 16 and can't drink yet and your parents have gone to bed). But after we graduated, Orlando slipped away on the different roads people take on their way to adulthood, didn't leave me his forwarding information, and we unintentionally became less important to each other. But he must have meant something to me because I just thought of him last week, or, should I say, I giggled to myself while driving as I remembered Ma Belle. ("Why are you laughing to yourself, Mom? Are you okay? I think Momma's lost it.") Orlando had just re-surfaced into our mutual friend's life. Orlando sent him an e-mail two days before he went in between this world and the other, where he is now. Just re-surfaced out of nowhere, very strange. Or not. I don't pretend to understand the mysterious forces that get us contacting people years after we've disappeared from each other. I wish Orlando had called me too.

I would have told him about the three kids I had, maybe my writing, and how I married a really cute guy. I possibly would have complained about boring domestic details and given him a littany of what goes on in suburbia, poor little me (wink). I definitely would have asked him to do Ma Belle for me.

I can't do that now.

What can I do instead? What would Orlando tell me to do?

Orlando would tell me to enjoy those naps with my baby girl. Orlando would tell me "Don't ground your kids into the next century for toilet-papering, we did it too!" He'd make me, and remind me to, laugh.

And I think he would tell me to not be in a race with the other people who will only meet the same fate as I will - sooner rather than later for him, tragically. He's 37. He'll stay 37. He'll be a teenager in my mind forever, and what is so wrong with that...we enjoyed being teenagers (read: infantile.) No regrets, it makes me smile.

I haven't talked to Orlando in years but he didn't reach a phone or e-mail to reach me.

Hey Orlando, I found the cows, and they are very wise.