Pile Up the Kindling

I have never been a social butterfly with hundreds of friends passing through my door constantly. I live in small groups of close friends that I hold on to tightly for support. In junior high this was primarily myself and Don. We turned into high-profile collaborators who had a great time taking on whatever we could. I also had a great friendship with Vicki. I was pretty shy around girls and Vicki was the first girl I felt comfortable enough to just talk to. She was always special to me. I like to think we could have been boyfriend/girlfriend in high school, and maybe further, if I hadn’t moved away. Don and I eventually lost touch over the years as we moved. I lost touch with Vicki for a while too but decided I wanted to try to track her down and see what she was doing. Surprisingly, it turned out to be easy over the internet because she was looking for me too. We reconnected and renewed our friendship and have kept up to this day. She lives on the other side of the country now, but, we have met and talked a few times when she comes home to visit her parents.

In high school I was accepted into the Brotherhood of Joe’s Basement. It was a small group of friends consisting of Joe, Randy, Elwood, and occasionally Joe’s brother Larry. We were all interested in travel, photography, music and astronomy and the gravity just pulled us together. Although we are all still friends, separated by distance, Joe and I were particularly close and I consider him my brother and his family and home were my surrogate family. He, Randy and I still keep in touch via email and phone. We get to see each other occasionally which is really nice.

I miss these groups terribly. I have several “friends” via my workplace now, but they are acquaintance friends, not brother friends. We talk a lot and we go golfing and stuff, but, I really miss my old “families.” I am very close to my wife’s family. Her sisters are mine and we all love each other very much as a family. My own family was not warm and affectionate so, although they are my biological family, my real family(s), the people I really learned caring from, are all families that have allowed me to join from the outside.

There was an auxiliary group of friends in high school that also continued on afterwards. These were the motocrossers. We all rode dirt bikes and that commonality kept us together for quite some time. That group, eventually known as the “Husky Brothers,” consisted of Randy (same one), Mark, myself, and Dave. Again, we have kinda kept up with each other over the years, but, it was not the close brotherly group the other one was and the loyalties were not there.

The “downstairs cellar gang” also had a connection to another character named Dale. Dale was a genius level person, highly interested in science, photography, and astronomy, who found school to be a total bore. It was all too easy for him with his intelligence level. We were friends for a while, even combined resources to build a couple of great darkrooms for photography, but he always scared me a little because he was very unpredictable and violent. His family was a disaster and he was just on his own. We will save the stories of the 80 molar hydrochloric acid, smokeless gunpowder, playing “army” with M100s, trying to destroy his neighbors house, “ha ha to you too sideburns,” and throwing his brother out of a second story window for another day. He eventually got hooked up with some bad characters who got him into drugs and he spent many years in and out of jail rather than in college improving his mind. Years later he finally met a good woman, turned himself around by becoming a religious zealot (now he scares me more), and is now a working family man. I applaud the turnaround, but mourn the loss of a potentially great scientist who never reached where he should have.

At the end of high school, and afterwards for several years, I was close friends with Craig. He lived near me and we shared a love of travel and the environment. We went out West several times together. He eventually married a girl from Tennessee and moved there. We lost touch as we both became “family men.” Craig’s big issue was always that he took everything very personally. Because we lost touch for several years, he apparently considered that a personal rebuff, and later, when I tried to reconnect with him, he just cut me off cold. A real shame as his oldest daughter, Rachel, was a chip off the old block and I know she is doing some nice things in environmental work. Her name is easy to find on the internet. It would have been nice to reconnect and catch up on how the families are doing.

All of these will be characters in the stories I will relate on these pages. Just wanted you to have a little background.