Binderama60for60

Posts are sometimes better viewed in a browser: https://binderama60for60.com/

Mike Goldenberg is one of my very best friends, has been for more than 40 years. When he visited me at the Lake a few weeks ago, we went to a bar for lunch. We had a few drinks and shared a bowl of soup with extra crackers, and more extra crackers. That’s friendship. We didn’t share a spoon, that would have been weird.

Our lives have diverged greatly over the past decades, but he hasn’t changed much. Yes we pick up like we never left off, which is typical with good friends. But there’s so much about G-berg that’s familiar. He’s got the same guttural though mild Philly drawl. He sighs a lot. When something doesn’t add up or I say something dubious, he still does that thing where he contorts his face from his brow to his chin, twists his mouth and closes one of his eyes. He doles out spot-on references from movies from the 80s and 90s. When he laughs, he kinda doubles over a bit. He’s funny but not in a haha way. He talks with his hands, often about some seriously stupid shit.

I kid! He doesn’t use his hands that much.

As I stated in the introductory post to this series, a key impetus for 60|60 is to share things that should be shared with people while we’re all here. I want them–and others–to know how much they’ve enriched my life. Of course there are hundreds of people who I could say that about, and I hope I’ve called them out in this series. But there are a precious few who get 1000+ words. G-berg is one of them.

Here we go

Imagine the voice of Morgan Freeman from “Shawshank…”: Yeah, I think it’d be fair to say I liked G-berg from the start.

We met freshman year at James Madison University in Virginia. I had pledged Kappa Sigma in my first semester, G-berg came along in the next. He seemed smart and affable; we got on quite well. I actually lobbied to have him as my “little brother” but a senior brother swooped in and poached him. On “hell night” that semester, I did something immature and ignorant, not directly affecting G-berg. But he called me out. He was right. That told me everything I needed to know about him.

Three years went by. There was a lot of drinking and stuff, some of which we’ll cover in a later post about the Kappa Sig days (mostly NSFW). G-berg became a good friend. As important, he proved himself to be a hard working, industrious soul, holding down jobs and creating opportunities for his friends to make some money. He tapped me to sell sodas at football games. $35 was righteous bucks in those days. He was also on an honors track, which I respected. Except that he was majoring in hospitality and restaurant management. So…whatever.

Skipping ahead to our final semester, senior year, G-berg and I roomed together in the fraternity house, room 206. We each needed just a few credits to graduate, so our class load was not challenging, I can assure you.

The fraternity hosted parties most every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and sometimes Tuesday. That meant on Sunday and Monday G-berg and I took turns picking up a six pack of beer on our way home “from the library.” Go ahead and chalk up codependent enablement as the foundation of our friendship.

Fun fact: G-berg’s middle name is S, no name or initial. If you know about Harry S Truman, you’re probably impressed. No matter, let’s move on. [We can’t just move on because G-berg just informed me his middle name is J, not S. Yeah, that happened today, August 21, 2025.]

Fun story: We visited Pargo’s, Harrisonburg’s best eatery, for lunch one day. He ordered the prime rib French dip. After he took a bite he summoned the manager to inform him that this was not prime rib, just roast beef. The manager seemed baffled but G-berg held his ground. It took me about 10 years to understand just how right he was. Give it up for the HRM major, with honors!

We formed a creative business that semester, designing, printing and selling T-shirts on contract and on spec. Clients included college organizations and events. We also got hired to paint the hallways of a new sorority on the Greek Row. We lost money, but hanging out in a sorority house every afternoon for a few weeks is the thing of bad (good) 80s movies.

In the party room of our own house, we painted murals of a Kappa Sig rush advertisement (The Most Wanted Man on Campus) and a sprawling rendition of the label for Virginia Gentlemen, a local bourbon. I can only assume both are now hidden under many coats of industrial paint.

With the money we made from our endeavors, we flew to Lincoln for the Nebraska-Oklahoma game, billed as the game of the century. We crashed with friends I’d made the previous summer as an intern at Disney. Horrible game, Nebraska lost, we drank a lot and flew home. Nobody in the house had missed us.

So we decided we should make a statement. Because we would often stay up later than the others, we’d place our stereo speakers in the hallway at 3 AM and blast the video version of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Just the 10-second musical break that featured a couple arguing: the woman says, “I don’t believe in reincarnation because I refuse to come back as a bug or as a rabbit!” To which the man responds, “You know, you’re a real ‘up’ person.” And then the song would kick back in. We actually lost a few friends over that! Petty.

In the weeks before we graduated we got all deep and self-important and Zen-esque, as one does at that age (thanks Robert Pirsig!). This photo of us was taken up in the mountains of the Shenandoah. We carried sticks, stood on rocks in the river, talked about heady stuff and buried a bottle of good whisky to recover someday, probably right about now. G-berg just informed me that we drank the whisky before we could bury it.

And then we graduated.

A man of firsts

G-berg was one of the first of our class to get a real job, get married and start a family. Probably the first to pull the complete trifecta.

While the rest of us were paying to have our resumes typeset on nice paper in order to find entry level work, G-berg landed a gig at Marriott HQ as an internal auditor. He made good money to travel to Marriott’s flagship 5-star resorts for weeks at a time. No doubt he worked hard, but local GMs felt the need to kiss his ass to ensure he was happy with his experience. Upgraded rooms, nice dinners, rounds of golf with management, etc. A 20-something could get spoiled by that. Not G-berg. Much.

When Mike and Pattie got married a few years out of college, I served as best man. I’d been a best man before, but I learned a lot from being G-berg’s best man. I learned that the best man is actually there to make sure the groom gets to the altar, especially when the rabbi is stuck in traffic, guests are growing restless, and the escape would be so easy. I learned that when the groom rents the cheapest van he can find and employs an intern to shuttle people from their hotel to the venue 30 miles out in the country, and then the van breaks down and won’t start, it’s up to the best man to “just come back and tell me that you fixed it.”

I also determined that if you judge the quality of a wedding toast by its length, I gave one of the best ever, maybe five minutes, maybe ten. It included an anecdote about Mike and Pattie’s recent visit to Disney, when I worked there. They wore matching shirts with big letters: Girl and Boy. In public. Unironically. They took pictures. It was the 80s. (Sorry to bring Pattie into this but she was rocking a serious 80s do! Jelly)

They started a family a few years later. Three boys eventually. All good guys making good lives for themselves and still coming home at every opportunity. A testament to their parents. But still no grandkids. What up wit dat, fellas?

Grownups

He’s been one of the most loyal people I’ve known. I hope I’ve returned in kind but I’m not so sure. I’ve moved around a lot over the years. G-berg and Pattie have too: Virginia, Akron, El Paso, Georgia, Florida, and probably a few other places in between, all the while raising a family. On top of that, and as I said at the top, our lives have diverged in so many ways: children, interests, careers, life’s distractions. I credit Mike’s loyalty for us staying close.

We’ve met up plenty of times over the years, at his place or mine or in some far-flung locale, often when one of us was on business (hello, Vegas). We did a week in Australia. G-berg got us a room in a high-rise hotel overlooking the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. We even climbed that sucker. I have photos of a double rainbow embracing the Opera House. Stunning. By the time we left, we were so done with that Opera House.

Both of us have played a lot of different roles in our careers, and those careers have been rocky at times. After his posh gig at Marriott (and a few stints as hotel GM), G-berg returned to his entrepreneurial passions, embracing technology at the right time. He started companies, built companies, managed companies. But life isn’t fair, as my Mom used to say. G-berg’s faced headwinds and overcome. He’s never claimed to be the victim or on the short end of anything. I’ve had some really hard times too, but I blame the gub-ment, natch.

A few years back we made an epic new memory. G-berg and I met up with another dear college friend, Dan Harvey, in Athens, Georgia. I’ll skip the backstory; suffice it to say it had to do with our fave college band REM. We acted like college kids but with ample funds, achy joints and a curfew. Detouring from a bar crawl, we stopped by the legendary 40 Watt Club to pick up tickets for that night’s show, Houndmouth. Curious, what time does the headliner go on? The lady did the math aloud and suggested, maybe 10:30. G-berg: At night??? We all took naps and made it to the show. The kids in the crowd were very polite. Why are you here? they asked. We mentioned REM and asked if they’d heard of them. OMG, yeah, I DO have a DAD! they exclaimed. And we weren’t even the oldest people there. The lead singer’s parents hung back with us at the bar. Respect.

On G-berg’s recent visit to the Lake, the topics of conversation had evolved in predictable ways. We still hash out pop culture. He’s hipper than me: he knows about music that’s been made in the 2020s and he is amped about a few streaming movies and shows. I enjoy reruns of “Frasier” and rewatching “Shawshank…” Apparently he doesn’t approve of the latter, and I don’t really care–there’s a lot of room for growth with him. He knows sports but is an Eagles fan and proudly wears swag with their stupid logo on it. These days, conversations inevitably veer into topics of health, pain, bowels and mortality. And thats…okay. As long as we keep the conversation going.

And so on

I’ll close by twisting another movie quote, this one by Jennifer Coolidge from “Best in Show.” We have so much in common. We share bowls of soup. We love talking…and not talking. We could not talk or talk forever, and still find things to not talk about. Goddamn right.

Happy Birthday, G-berg. Thanks for the friendship and everything else.