It has been a hard decade.The distance between that line and this is immeasurable. It is roughly the distance between my retirement and now. During that time I have seen my sister suffer through a horrible cancer and watched her pass away on the morning of her 60th birthday. I watched my dad become feeble and waste away. I have suffered personal hardship. I have watched my country become a divided cesspool of unbelievable extremes, fueled by nefarious people who are sworn to serve. I have watched our government become irredeemably arrogant.

But it has been an exciting decade as well. I have wanted to live in Florida for decades, and finally we were able to make that dream come true. We love it here. We found ourselves in the bullseye and got to ride out a category 5 hurricane! What an experience! I wouldn’t want to do it again but what a ride it was! I love my family. I have lost so many family members but I hold them in my heart and believe that I will see them someday again. I love my friends as well. Today I lost one of those friends and there is just sadness inside. We were opposites politically, socially, and disagreed on practically every issue, but at the end of almost every phone call, Dale would tell me he loved me. I would tell him the same. I’m going to miss that.

You might wonder what any of this has in common and honestly I don’t know. This is how my mind works most of the time, but I remember when we were young, and the world lay before us, and we had all the answers, and we were invincible and before I could catch my breath I’m old, and the last time I was up to visit I called him and we met for margaritas. I forgot to take a picture of us.That damn picture would mean a lot to me right now. I was never able to convert him to my way of thinking, and we are all out of phone calls now but I’m going to miss you Dale, God bless and goodbye.

ws