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Make new friends, keep the old
The one is silver... the other gold
By Jeff Mullin, Enid News & Eagle
There are some moments in life you will never forget.
The moment you meet the love of your life is one, as is the moment you first hold your child.
Weddings, graduations and other happy occasions tend to burn themselves indelibly into our memories. Of course, so do sad times.
An early morning phone call last Saturday carried a voice I hadn't heard in years, offering news I didn't want to hear.
A man I had known for more than 40 years, and who had been my best friend almost from the moment we first met, had died.
My thoughts immediately turned to the sunny fall morning so many years ago, my first day of school in a new town. It was outside, near the bike rack, in the early morning sunlight. He had a round, friendly face and curly black hair. He said his name was Steve, and he was in the fifth grade, just like me.
He has been part of my life ever since.
He was easy to be friends with, with a generous soul, a giving nature and an infectious laugh I can still hear today. He laughed easily and often. It was one of his gifts.
We shared the joys and travails of fifth and sixth grades. We were starting to realize girls were not quite as noxious as we had believed in previous years, and it was actually OK to be friends with them.
The next year we were small fish in the ocean of junior high. We widened our circle of friends. His was much wider than mine.
We always had a good time, whether standing with our tongue-tied brethren on the periphery of junior high dances, cutting up in class, playing all manner of sports after school or just hanging around the local bowling center.
High school brought the freedom of wheels. It seems we spent most of those years either in class or in our cars. Early mornings were often spent doing doughnuts on the snow packed driver's ed range just behind our school. After school we played extended games of motorized "tag," with one car chasing, another trying to keep up.
At about that time our dads began to notice, for some mysterious reason, the tires on the family cars were not wearing as well as they did when we were younger.
One Halloween we discovered the subversive fun of tossing eggs at parked cars. We quickly learned it was nearly impossible to throw eggs from a moving car without having some collateral damage to the offending vehicle. If our dads ever noticed how clean their cars were when we brought them home after a night on the prowl, they never said anything.
We shared everything, a love of sports, a love of music, our hopes, our dreams, our fears and our struggles through the morass of teenage angst.
After high school we both went away to college. He stayed in state. I opted for a different part of the country. We saw each other on holidays and during the summers. During my freshman year I lost my dad, and we shared that, too.
Finally I met a young woman who changed my life again. After a time we decided to marry, and there was no one else I wanted to be my best man. Just a day before the wedding he was trying to ride my motorcycle in the driveway at my future wife's parents' house, and almost crashed headlong into the garage. We laughed until we nearly cried.
After college we spoke once or twice a year. We were both working, trying to get a foothold on the mountain of adulthood. One day in 1984 he called. "What's up?" I asked. "Oh," he said, "I just won the Michigan lottery."
He had two winning tickets that would up paying him nearly $5.5 million. He intended to keep working, but pressure from colleagues led him to quit. After that his life seemed to lose purpose and direction.
He was a big bear of a man, with a gentle soul, a sweet spirit. He was generous, kind and considerate. He also was the best friend anybody could ever have.
Cherish your friends, even those who live far away. Call often, write frequently, visit every chance you get.
You never know which chance will be your last.
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