We just don’t always get around to having speaks of Thanksgiving that we need to.

I don’t know how else to put it.  I am always glad when I hear from my Mom that she has sent someone a card or a short letter.  I know what that means.  I try to live up to that too.  A trip to the mailbox was testament to that earlier today and I hope the chap I desire to liven up a day for finds the spirit of the intent.  It is not a difficult thing to do.

But, days turn into months and months turn into years and you look around and you realize that this is where you are now at this moment and, yes, there are many things that you could have done differently.  That is where I am today as I type these words.

Darryl Kidd and I were always friendly.  I liked him.  I liked him a great deal.   Darryl was in a room with me at the Medora Community School Corporation Administrative Office in 2002 and it was a day that changed my life for the better.  I never told him that.  I wish I had.  I’d like to believe that was a given.  But I would have liked to of looked him in the eye, man to man, and said thank you again.

Jim Stewart called me and asked that I come back to work at Medora Schools in 2002.  He was the principal and needed a school counselor and he wanted me to be the one to do it.  I told Chief, I called him Chief, that I did not have a counseling license.  Chief told me I would get one.  He was persuasive that way.  And so it was.  On a day in early August I met with then school superintendent Drew Day and school board member Darryl Kidd.  I was familiar with both of these guys.  I taught one of Darryl’s sons.

These two looked at me and told me they wanted me to come back to Medora to help the students there.  I was there for two-plus years from March 1998 till the end of 2000.  Let me just say when I was asked back, I told Jim Stewart I will be there the next day if need be.  We settled on the next school year, 2002-2003, for starters.

What I was given by these gentlemen is a chance that does not come around very often in the education business.  They let me work toward, and slowly pay for as I went, my master’s degree in school counseling from the University of Louisville.  I started in the fall of 2002 and finished in the spring of 2007.  At the end of the tunnel I had my degree and paid for it along the way.  Some of those tuition bills were hard swallows nonetheless.  It would have never worked out this way had U of L and IUS not hammered out recent, at the time, reciprocity agreements. Graduate hours are not cheap.

Needless to say, Darryl Kidd was very instrumental is putting me in a position to succeed.  I did just that.  All told I was fortunate to be employed by Medora Schools for more than fifteen years.  Being an old Jackson County boy, it was not as long of a drive as some believe it was.  I left Medora at the right time at the end of the 2015 school year.  It worked out fine, thanks in part to folks like Darryl Kidd.

Darryl Kidd died this past Thursday, December 10th at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Indy after a prolonged illness.  At Medora, Darryl would just show up at my office unannounced, help himself to a seat and always ask modestly, “Is everything going okay, Dan?”  He was there to help me.  I knew it then.  But it means more now, given I have a few more years and more experience to weigh it all.  I have been blessed in this business.  I have been surrounded by good folk at every stop.

Darryl Kidd is on the far left in this photo at a Medora Prom in 1999 is my guess.  There are some legends here for sure.

My thoughts and prayers to Darryl Kidd’s family and all who knew and loved him.

Yesterday I took a good walk for the first time in a long time.  I have been under the weather.  I always say better under the weather than under the ground.  A touch of bronchitis and a sinus infection.  I’m still here.  And yesterday I found some helpful light before the winds came in and the afternoon temperatures betrayed us.

I’m not going to say that Darryl Kidd was in that sunshine that felt so good.  And I am not going to say that he wasn’t!  But yesterday, for a while, everything was indeed going okay for Dan.

Speaking the rights…

Danny Johnson