Yesterday I thought about one of my friend from my teenage years. I hadn’t thought about him or his family in a long while, as we lost touch long ago when I moved out of the area and followed a different path than he. His family lived down the street from us and we had spent many evenings just hanging out, shooting the bull and working on our bicycles, and later, our cars.
His father was the owner of a repair garage and junk yard and was incredibly talented in that he could figure out anything that was wrong with a car. In fact, I once saw him hook up a gas can and a battery to a V8 sitting on the garage floor and he got it running. The engine wasn’t in a car, it was just sitting there on the floor, running as if it didn’t know any better and incredibly loud. His son had inherited his ability and taught me a great deal about the inner workings of an engine. He fixed up an old Dodge trucker and later an early 70s Dodge Charger hotrod. He once helped my dad and I swap an engine out of my second car in high school, a 1976 Pontiac Astre (we called it the Disastre). He was a good friend and I was thinking about the times that we would drive around in his truck, thinking we were big bad asses in a really small town. We didn’t do any harm, just pumped our egos a little bit.
When I woke up this morning, I realized that in addition to the fleeting thoughts of yesterday, I had dreamed about my friend and his father and mother last night. There was nothing spectacular about the dream, it was just basically reliving a summer night such as last night, when we would sit on the porch, watch television and shoot the bull a little bit. I didn’t think much of it, I thought that the fleeting thoughts were just lingering a little longer than usual.
My friend’s father passed away on Tuesday at 91 years old. I guess he was just stopping by on his way to the other side to say that he remembered the geeky red-headed boy from down the street.
