Time for a blast from the past

I have a little problem. I am going out of town for a couple of days and I have no posts stacked up to post while I am gone. A friend of mine emailed me the other day to say he was going to be in Florida visiting with his mother. Rick and I spent quite a bit of time together back in 1977. We had both been selected to attend certain schools for our companies (he was with AT&T and I was with Pacific Telephone at the time). We clicked right away.

We would tell people that we grew up in different cities together. We both had a golf addiction. We had similar views of the world. And neither of us took the schools we attended very seriously. We consumed a lot of beer and other adult beverages. We chased a few women, played quite a bit of golf, and generally acted like we were teenagers.

After the school was over, we kept in touch for awhile. He went through a divorce, as did I. He remarried, as did I. He moved to California from Virginia, I moved to Virginia from California. I moved first, he moved after I had moved to Florida. That was when we lost touch. Eventually, we both retired. He and Ellen retired to a condo near Ensenada in Baja California. Faye and I ended up here in Sebring (aka Paradise). We happened to cross paths a few years ago when Faye and I were visiting San Diego.

Rick and I will play some golf this Thursday, weather permitting, at a course up near Tampa. This will be interesting. We never competed at golf though we often played together. It was just about having fun.

On the last day of classes, the class threw a picnic of sorts. We bought a lot of beer, hot dogs, and some other things, fired up the barbecue grills the motel the companies had booked us in, and partied all day. Class, for the last 3 weeks, started at Midnight. We would all be flying back to our respective cities in the morning.

As the afternoon came to a close, Rick and I were the only ones left still standing. We were engaged in an effort to drive golf balls across the parking lot of the shopping mall next door and up onto the roof of a Lazarus department store. No thought was given to the balls that did not reach the roof... until a peculiar "woosh" was heard followed by the crack of a golf ball hitting the parking lot nearby. What goes up - and doesn't reach the roof - comes back down with a vengeance after ricocheting off the Lazarus' wall. We didn't stop hitting those golf balls, though.

That was just one example of our collective stupidity. Most of the others also involved the consumption of alcoholic beverages. I found out today that neither of us drinks much, if anything, alcoholic these days. Probably a good thing. I hope it won't put a damper on the fun.