March 31.

April 2000 Z and Terry and Aloysious It’s April the first again. The big event of yesterday was just a phone call from a friend. How can one place such a unique value on such a simple event? Easy. There are not many people in this life’s litany of faces that could be called old friends. Not many. Maybe one. This one. The same high school and college made familiar chums of us. Okay, drinkin’ buddies. Our twenties and thirties held many a serious soiree and frivolous venture: parties, continuous card games, art fairs and concerts, our respective mates of the era in tow. There were new cars to break in with road trips and new bars to evaluate with late tipple. There were wedding parties to be missed and divorce de-briefings at the neighborhood bar. Fast friends we were, through it all, from top-of-the-world success to upside-down in a ditch, more than once. The mutual friendship stands solid for fifty years. Surely our mates have grown weary of one’s tall tales of the other. Meetings have grown seldom over the past 20 years with various travels separating us. From weekly greetings to monthly meetings, semi-annual get-togethers to a phone call every year or so. Duties and wandering took this life to other places. He retired his life from the programming profession and exchanged his nice home on the river for a fifth-wheel camper. He and his wife have lived on the road for more than fifteen years. A post office box number in Kansas is their only anchor. The last contact was seven years ago now. It was a phone message to give their location. He had pulled his rolling home into a park camp ground on a new lake in the south part of the state. He and his wife were hard at their favorite occupation when I found them: making friends at a local bar in a near-by small town. We laughed, fished a bit, took a picture and laughed some more. Good friends are few, old friends are fewer still. The next day he and his wife were headed for another lake, further north. Summer was coming. In the following years, contact was lost completely. Notes and cards with address changes and new phone numbers, sent to that post office box drew no answer. Ominous concern (read “worry”) began to cloud any thoughts about this wandering friend. Then on Saturday, April first, a phone call. “Hello?” “Hey, Kingfish! Is that you?” It’s always nice to hear from a long-lost friend, even if he can’t remember your name.