There are lots of interesting things swirling around, distracting us from stuff that matters.

You know what I am saying. Breathless TV yackers touting the latest polling data from one side or another. Surprise, they say their side is likely to win in November.

Note for the record: If I were a hot-shot pollster and could really predict the future, I would head for Las Vegas.

If you go through your news feed/TV cable chat shows/newspapers and journals, you will find opinions on everything from the catapults that fling jets off a carrier deck to how Ukrainian drones are revolutionizing modern warfare.

You can find opinions disguised as news about the White House ballroom, the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, and the alleged lack of shampoo on a carrier at sea.

You can discover religious leaders splitting theological hairs to fit their political leanings and actors playing doctors and nurses touting miracle cures for everything from toe fungus to brain cancer and, well, you get what I mean.

But somehow they don’t get around to the important things that affect our real lives, like I experienced last week, when I spent a few hours saying goodbye to a pair of old friends.

I sat across the bridge table from Dick Brooke for years, marveling at his intellect and almost preternatural skills. After a hand, he would always explain, only if asked, why we should have done this or that. We used to ride along lush green fairways, poke through bushes for errant balls, and lament putts that almost found the hole; we chatted about politics and the world. Did we always agree? Not on your life. But we always listened to the others' arguments. Mostly we talked about our families, and no one was prouder of his brood, especially his wife, Jackie, and his kids and grandkids, than Dick Brooke.

As he reached 90 or so, his body slowed down, and golf became a memory, but the engineer’s mind, which once helped build the Star Wars toys that keep us all safe, was still sound.

As hard as it was to say goodbye to Dick, it was tougher to think that Sam Stevens, my pal, and sainted mother-in-law, would no longer sit on my back deck explaining her view of the world as I poured her just one more bourbon and water. On paper, our relationship was complicated by the very human interaction and generations that forged our lives. She, from a French-speaking Lewiston mill town neighborhood, and I, rooted in Hoosier farm and city values.

We shared a love of country. We shared our appreciation for veterans (yes, she was a vet, too), a love of politics, and the importance of morality in our dealings with others, especially family. Along with her family duties, she had a passionate devotion to Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library, especially the used bookstore. She spent hours in that falling-down building cataloguing and sorting boxes of discards, lugging them up the decidedly pre-building-code staircase where they rested until a place opened up on the shelves. She spent hours sitting behind a desk chatting with customers, always ready to suggest another title, a favorite restaurant, or a scenic vista. And that little bookstore, which sold works for a buck or two, provided about $30,000 a year to the library.

Most of all, as she sipped her Jim Beam, she helped me understand the other side of the battle of the sexes. Oh, I understood the masculine side, the strong, protective, fiscally responsive side. But somehow I missed (or ignored) the lecture on listening to and accepting the arguments on topics that mattered to women.

For example, nothing would have lit her fuse like the way MaineHealth closed their labor and delivery services at Miles Hospital in Damariscotta. She knew delivery was the most dangerous activity a woman could experience. She and other women knew that lots of things can, and do, go wrong as they bring new life into the world. She would have said that subjecting an expectant mother to the uncertainty of driving about an hour to reach the OB unit in Brunswick, when Miles was 20 minutes closer, was just plain stupid.

Of course, she understood the details of the fiscal, demographic and staffing arguments for closure, but in her mind, none of them would have, or could have, trumped the chance that a mother might lose her infant or worse, her own life.

For my pal Sam believed, above all, that the family was paramount, that anyone or anything that threatened its existence was ill-informed, stupid, evil, or worse.

I’ll miss them both.