Yesterday reader Webfoot stopped by. It was great to see an old friend. He'd dropped his daughter off in Stockton at University of the Pacific for the spring term, where she is a sophomore music major. How things have changed.
We were both in our twenties ourselves when we met at the middle school in San Bernardino County (about 35 miles east of Los Angeles) where we had gotten jobs teaching. We worked together for 16 years. I was best man at his wedding, we were golf buddies, we took our kids camping together. Then I got the community college job and am in my tenth year here in Visalia. Thanks to the marvel of e-mail we've been in regular contact ever since. We've also played in fantasy baseball and football leagues as competitors many times.
We went to a Chinese restaurant for lunch. For 6.95 apiece we got enough food for two meals each. (I ought to do a story on the excellent restauranting around here.) We talked a little politics and then caught up on the doings of our wives and kids. My wife has just bought a car, for instance, a hybrid no less. Good for her. Then a little about the increasing aches and pains now that we're both in our fifties. Although he is just barely in his, I have to concede.
Afterwards I drove him around town a little. Then he had a three and a half hour drive ahead of him back to southern Cal. He would be sure to engage in his hobby, finding a couple of geocaches along the way, of course. He was a geography major. If you're interested, in geocaching you use a GPS locater to try to find little hidden "caches" that people have left around. Then you sign the book and post that you've found the hidden treasure. He does a blog on it called Electronic Breadcrumbs. You can go to it here.
Anyway, as he drove off and in the day since I can say I'm really happy we've kept up our correspondence. Our time together was quite at ease. There was none of that awkward kind of stuff where you see someone you haven't in a long time and find you seem to have little in common or rapport anymore. Keeping up with friends is a great thing to do.
1 comment:
I'm glad that we've kept up the friendship as well. It would have been very easy for it to disappear when you took the job in Visalia. The new technology has allowed us to keep that friendship intact, where fifty years ago, it would have been letters every 3 months or so and a hundred years ago, if someone had moved away, that would probably have been it.
For other readers, you can learn more about geocaching here.
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