Good Friends - speaktherights.com

Good friends are no guarantee. You are either going to make them or you are not.

I can look back on friends I had thirty years ago that I have lost touch with…totally. Not by choice. It just happens that way. I am a little saddened by it when I stop and be still and think about them. But that really doesn’t last all that long. If it did, I would make a mission out of it. I don’t do that. Life just treats us this way.

I have kept up with friends that I have known much longer than thirty years…it is almost comical to think in those terms. When we get together it is as if time has stood still…unless we are talking about our kids. Our children are proof that time has not stood still. Time has flown.

Jerry Brown was in my wedding. I was in his wedding. His wedding was in 1992. My wedding was in 1996. The last day we spent together in school was in May of 1979. I moved that summer. He did not. Like I said, we have indeed kept up with each other. To this day when we get together we just take up wherever we left off. John Lodge of The Moody Blues refers to that relationship as not friendship…but as being “mates”. I like that. I also like John’s songs “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band), It May be a Fire, and Love is on the Run”…among others. I think I just took some liberty with some quotation marks.

When I knew I would no longer be hanging out with Jerry Brown in the 6th grade…given that I had moved…I was very apprehensive the first day at my new school. Firstly, I was in a building that was, to me, antiquated. I had never seen a structure quite like it. It had no air conditioning. My old school did. It had funny windows and long blinds the teachers would occasionally pull down. To quote Dorthy, “I was not in Kansas anymore”. The more I looked around and the more I perspired…the more I wished I was at my old school. And that was just in the first 15 minutes of the first day before the rest of the students I did not know showed up.

I think it was Susan Christie that told Mick Rutherford and Kelly Samons that a new guy was sitting in Mrs. Lambert’s 6th grade classroom by himself as others that had filtered in had gravitated toward their friends and left the new kid hanging in the wind.

Mick and Kelly came and sat down next to me. They peppered me with questions. I answered them. In an amount of twenty minutes, I stopped thinking about what my friend Jerry was doing at my old school. I moved on…quickly.

I’m so glad Mick and Kelly and I caught the last of 1970s together in a 6th grade classroom that quickly became home to me.

The three of us, Mick, Kelly, and myself have stayed dear friends all of these years. You can tell how miserable we are around each other in the following picture taken at Kelly’s daughter’s wedding this past early June.