Old Friends

Battling sickness, fatigue, and some beautiful fall weather, we took a little break from the blog last week. The good news is that everyone is back to being healthy, and I've hopefully carried enough diseases off with me from my last trans-Pacific flight to keep our immune systems on high alert through winter.

First off, I'd like to thank my good friends in Singapore for their hospitality during my recent visit. It's not every day you get to see an F1 road race...and it's even more rare that you get to see the first one held at night, so that was a very cool experience. I also got the opportunity to lose a taxi to a French girl wearing nothing but fishnets, a racing suit, and a cigarette, so that was lovely.

Secondly, I've been thinking a lot lately about the close friends I've had over the years. I've been blessed to have lots of good friends in life, and I've always tried to keep in touch with a lot of those people. This is due, in part, to my complete inability to interact with people now socially. But I also think that having some people around who have known you for a long time keeps you grounded. Nothing reminds you that you are, and always have been, an idiot like someone who has watched you fall on your face repeatedly in life -- like a friend from school.

I've only had a couple of really close friends who I've completely lost touch with over the years. One was a friend from my days in the Indianapolis Children's Choir. I remember seeing him for the last time at a party after we had completed our respective tours of duty in choir. We were freshmen in high school at the time, and it was the last time I ever saw him. I ran across a picture of his family recently on a web site, but I was unable to make any further headway in tracking him down.

Similarly, when anyone asks me who my best friend in elementary school was, I've always answered "Shawn." (I'll withhold his last name out of what is assuredly a desire on his part to distance himself from me, if at all possible.) Shawn and I spent lots of time riding bikes all over the place, going to Little League games, torturing his little brother and playing on his computer. I think we probably bonded, in part, in an effort to provide each other protection. Neither of us qualified as "cool kids" and probably spent the vast majority of our elementary school years defending ourselves from armed packs of 3rd graders declaring us to be dorks. In any case, my memories of time spent with Shawn are all positive, and I've always regarded him as one of the better people I've had the pleasure of knowing in life, even if we were only eight years old.

After our 5th grade year, I moved and changed school districts and shortly thereafter, Shawn moved to a new town altogether. We predictably lost touch, and I've always wondered what happened to him. I frequently thought about him over the years and hoped that life had treated him well. Last week, shortly after I returned from Singapore, my dad called and informed me that he had met Shawn one afternoon in front of their house. Through a strange set of coincidences, Shawn was related to one of my parent's neighbors and had stopped by and even inquired about me.

I was disappointed in having missed the opportunity to speak with my old friend, but just this past weekend, Shawn was in town again and gave me a ring. We haven't had the opportunity to get together yet, but we exchanged numbers and hopefully we'll get it together soon enough. Shawn has kids of his own now, and it will be a pleasure to meet them, introduce them to Grant, and get reacquainted. And maybe most importantly, it will provide my wife with yet more evidence from a third party that I have, indeed, been like this my whole life.