Old Friends

I met Dave when we were 15.  He lived just down the road, about 4 blocks away.  He was the Methodist preacher's son who lived across the street from his church.   He had come from the coast and had attended a school many times larger than ours.   I was a Lutheran who had recently moved into town from the farm.  My new school was twice as large as the school that I had attended in Hay.  Lacrosse High had over 100 students. 

He always pushed the boundaries, in relative form.  Boundaries were very defined and narrow in our hometown of Lacrosse.  He started playing a guitar.  We sat and sang folk songs, some with deep religious meaning.  He talked me into buying a motorcycle which he had already done. He instigated a motorcycle trip for our senior tour.  Five farm boys traveled on Honda 65's thru 125's to Samish Island near Burlington to his friend's cabin. Then home via the Olympic Peninsula and White Pass.  We traveled most of the way on roads that don't allow small motorcycles any more. 
 I went to PLU.  He went to UPS.  I went to graduate school.  He went to Viet Nam.  I traveled southeast Asia as a teacher.  He came home to be a cop.  I came home to be a teacher.  We raised our kids.   We worked hard to provide for our family and our community.  I studied to be a principal.  He took flight lessons to work to locate marijuana fields.  Different paths should have drawn us apart.  It did, but only in location.  We saw each other only a time or two each year but we stayed close.

We are both retired now and are each doing our own thing.  On a cloudless and beautiful day recently, Dave called me.  "Want to fly with me up to Orcas Island for lunch?"  "Sure"  Within the hour he picked me up at a local airport.  A little more than an hour later we were flying over the San Juan islands. 

After landing, Dave extricated two folding bikes for the back of the plane.  We two old codgers may have looked peculiar peddling those bikes down to a restaurant by the water.

Fun.  Not what a lot of old codgers do.  Those were the type of boundaries that Dave tended to push.

Old friends.

Assembling the bikes