The journey of our lives takes us down many roads. Along the way we meet many travelers on those roads. Forty three years traveling those roads seem to pass at the speed of light until time stops long enough to remember good times with a dear friend. The Mississippi River, the Father of Waters, takes no notice. The changing of the seasons continues as if nothing has happened, but everything is suddenly different. Somehow the rainbow of autumn colors have replaced the bright green of spring. This morning’s cool breeze gives me pause, and takes new meaning. It evokes memories of frosty mornings in Oxford from the fall of 1980.
In this moment, there is time to reflect on memories. I remember meeting a wonderful, slightly crazy woman in my Contracts class at the University of Mississippi Law School. To me, she was always ‘Ditto’, and to her, I was always ‘Garner’. Together with a small group of other lunatics, we left our marks on Ole Miss, the Gin and the Beacon. A friend and I used to set off the alarms off at the school marijuana patch just so we could go to her Roundhouse apartment and watch the lights of the police cars converge on the marijuana patch. I remember driving over to some sleazy dive bar in Clarksdale with her and her roommate to hear a band. That band would become The Tangents and her roommate would marry the lead singer.
We lost touch for many years, then one of our group became ill with a cancer that would eventually take him away. That was a sad time, and some of us reconnected. In looking about the room on that sad day, it struck me that though so many came to remember him, they were only a few of the many he touched in his journey through life. He reached so many who could not make the journey to remember him. One of the great problems with the human condition is that we are only here for a short time. It seems to me so sad that in our brief journey we sometimes lose track of those who are dear to us, or perhaps the fog of life and mists of time obscures, perhaps erodes the deep fondness with which we once held each other.
I’m plan to go to Oxford this week to be there for my friend who has passed, and her husband, my friend who mourns her passing. Funerals truly are for the living. We will gather to smile and remember the days in the springtime of our lives when we were bright, young and full of hope. Our lives promised adventure and challenge. We laughed, drank gallons of beer, sang the best that rock and roll had to offer, and lived like there was no tomorrow.
We would never have believed it then, but tomorrow eventually comes for all of us.
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