As I was returning to Silver City to vote I passed many memory-evoking places. Places I had been with Lou. One of the spots was the Grant County airport. You can’t see it very well from the highway, but every time Lou and I passed it he would crane his neck and say something like, “I think that’s the tower. I wonder if they have (insert aeronautic jargon here).” Lou was a pilot, so he was curious about things like that.
One day, since I was driving, I turned onto the airport road. Surprised and somewhat alarmed, Lou cried, “Where are you going?!?”
“To look at the damned airport you keep wondering about.”
“Oh,” he replied, somewhat delighted but mostly ill at ease because this was a break from the expected, a variation in the routine. Lou needed to feel in control. I understood that because he had lived through some unstable years.
On the other hand, I had developed sort of a Zen approach to life. I had accepted (mostly?) that there wasn’t much I could control — or that I needed to control. Flow with the river, Grasshopper. Perhaps my rather benign life had allowed me the luxury of seeing things that way.
So Lou and I were kind of yin and yang — opposites that somehow fit well together. I miss that man.
I'm sorry for your loss. I lost my best friend more than a year ago and I still miss her some days so you can probably expect your loss to show up every now and then. But, that's OK. It just reminds us us great they were to know in the first place.
ReplyDeleteLinda Sand
I once asked my therapist how she kept going in the face of so much misery. "One person at a time, Mike." she said. "One person at a time."
ReplyDeleteYuh done good Grasshopper.
Making me cry my brother. Beautiful.
ReplyDelete