Carl and Booker taking it easy today

Email is a good thing.  We get informed with email.    We give and receive messages via email.  We share pictures with email.  We use email while we work.  I suppose sometimes we even hide our faces behind email.  Hey, it can’t be all good.

Every now and then, however, we might receive an email that transcends this futuristic day and age where one can use a Netflix account to whittle away through entire seasons of “Fraiser” in short order.  Why and how the transcendence?  Because this email came from a voice I learned from long before email became a fixture in our lives.  We have had many conversations in person and on the phone in the last twenty-four years.  I can count on two hands…barely…how many emails we have exchanged.  This fact does not disappoint me.  I am old-fashioned that way.

I reached out via email to Millard Dunn earlier this month.  An old college chum and I had been reliving a space in time that was both funny and educational.  This story was conveyed in a post I entered in September.  Dr. Millard Dunn was the teacher in the room that day.

I did not receive a reply, as we call it, to my email with any sort of swiftness.  In fact, I figured Millard had not gotten his message.  I figured his email address had changed and I would sooner or later have to call his home phone number.  I still have it memorized.  I suppose he is still using it.  Some of us have allowed land lines to go east with the geese and exclusively use cell phones instead of what we used to call BELL-phones.

A few days ago I looked at my email.  I had indeed received a “reply” from Millard. His email had changed.  He said he felt he was fortunate to find my message.  It was so good to read his words and to “hear” his voice.  One of the most distinct voices I have ever heard, I would be content listening to Millard read the rules of soccer to me….and I have no time for the game whatsoever.  I covered my thoughts on his teaching and his caring spirit in my September post.

So I listened in to the voice as I read along.  Delighted at Millard’s timing that rolls along like a river that turns corners that are swift but easily maneuvered.  Again, he is a good read.

He had kind things to say about my Henry David Thoreau project.  That he still remembers it is an honor.  If you read about it, you probably have no doubt he still remembers it…given his ending reaction to the play I put on.  I also believe he truly does enjoy that memory.  That makes me prouder still.  I was able to give a little…as I took a great deal.

As I type these words I am less than thirty miles from where Millard Dunn went to high school.  He went to high school in Wilmington, North Carolina.  He went to Duke University after that.  They taught him well.  I doubt they taught him as well as he taught me.

GAINING GROUND…

Word has gotten back to Indiana, perhaps by email, that I fell victim to some bad vittles after we got here in North Carolina.  I am just glad I was the only one.  My dear wife, Carrie, is getting over the flu.  Our son Jarrett and his sweet Hilary, from New Mexico, are here too and they don’t deserve to get that sick.  I did.  Lewis Grizzard once called one his illnesses a case of “you gotta feel better to die sick”.  In 56 hours I ate two cans of soup.  Both coming in the late late stages of that time.  I never dreamed I would go on vacation and lose ten pounds.

I am gaining ground….and…

speaking the rights near a beach getting some dredging work done to help some beach farther north, hence the giant black hose.

Danny Johnson