A Lifetime Friendship
Eric and I met many, many years ago, around the time
I was in the seventh grade, and he was in the fifth. My chief
memory from that time is of Eric running at me, in slow-mo,
just like the $6 million man, maybe even wearing a safari
jacket just like Lee Majors, perhaps even making the slow-
motion running sound effects as he charged at me, throwing
a looping slow-motion punch. The only thing was, Eric, whose
name at the time was Joey, was not at all bionic.
I promptly seized him up off the ground and smashed him
back down into a twisted pile of wreckage. Ouch! Such blatant
bullyhood on my part, such cruelty, and yet, what a smile-producing memory! Nowdays, at equal
heights and variable equal weights (at 6'2" we both seem to skip about from 215 to 240 pounds!)
it would be quite a challenge to seize him off the ground and slam him back down into a twisted
pile of carnage.
His earliest memory from that time is a little more civilized, thank goodness. He remembers
asking to borrow my ultra-cool red-white-and-blue softball mitt -- and I actually let him borrow it!
Day after day, he'd ask to borrow the big kid's softball mitt, and day after day, the big kid lent
it to him.
We really did not hook up as best friends until my senior year of high school, his sophomore
year. He was the new kid at boarding school, homesick and blue, and I was the established
senior, cool and acclimated to life in the big bad world. I remember telling him that the way to
handle being so homesick was to immerse yourself in a thick fantasy novel . . . I believe I leant
him "Sword of Shannara" by Terry Brooks, but it might have been J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of
the Rings."
But Eric and I connect, brain to brain, dream to dream, humor to humor -- for many years, even when he lived in Denver, and I in Sacramento. He was my best man when I was 23 and then 10 years later, after my divorce, and after his divorce and remarriage, he was my best man again when I was 33 years old (he and I both got it "RIGHT" the second time around). We've also had similar paths away from God and back again, and after several years of not talking to each other, we found ourselves at the same church in Denver, serving the Lord together!
Eric is an extremely talented painter, a fine musician, philosopher, intellectual and packs one of the meanest giggles since Tom Hulce broke our eardrums in "Amadeus." An undiscovered renaissance man, Eric is perfecting his oil painting in Denver, devising his own photographic and yet expressionistic style that is waiting like a smoking volcano for the world to gape in awe over, and the kid isn't even 40 yet!
