February 13 – Ten years ago I would never have walked into something like this.
A bear trap so poorly camouflaged a child would have seen it but I didn’t.
I pried it open and got my leg out but there was no way I could make it back.
I was prepared to die out here.
And to be honest, I felt I deserved it.
A man gets too old for a job he should know it, and stop.
But then Buck found me. I don’t know how.
No one knew where I was going but he found me and carried me back.
Three days over terrain a mule couldn’t navigate. Laughing his ass off the entire way. Riding like that, completely helpless, slung over Buck’s shoulder and staring down his back I came to understand two things.
One, at a certain point in life a man’s hips spread and there’s nothing you can do about it and two, there’s a very easy way to define friendship.
A friend is someone who won’t stop until he finds you and brings you home.
Sergeant Robert Fraser RCMP, “Due South” episode “Manhunt”
I’ve considered myself very fortunate through the years to know more than a few people who I’ve had the privilege to call “friend” and whose company has enriched my life in ways that I’m still discovering to this very day.
I remember having a conversation along these lines with the lady who was leading the AS/400 Alert project in Rochester MN where I’d take the release notes written in EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) for a quarter-inch tape full of OS/400 operating system patches and translate it into HTML and put it onto a website or EMAIL it to the customer, whichever they preferred.
For eight months straight I’d spend two weeks in Minnesota and then less than a week at home. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Mind you, she’d also noticed that the grueling schedule I’d been maintain shuttling back and forth had finally started to take it’s toll about five months after pretty much everyone else who had been loaned to them from the RTP had long since burnt out and begged her to put them on the next flight to Raleigh. When the big boss on the project asks you to lunch, I was half expecting her to hand me the plane tickets with a “thanks for the effort, kid!”
We were having a lunch at Cheap Charlie’s in downtown Rochester (and almost three decades later they’re still there with the biggest plates of amazing food and a pop for much less than anywhere else in town!) when she made the observation that she’d noticed two things about me:
- I tended to say very little, especially in team meetings, but she really looked forward to when I’d actually speak up because it was generally worth hearing.
- I didn’t seem to be the type that would have many friends but the ones that I did have were usually top-of-the-line quality.
What I wasn’t expecting at all was her to actually apologise for leaving it to me to survive by my own wits without any support from management which left me in a state of shock. After all, I’d grown up with the ethos of “with your shield or on it” and if anything hurts, just tape a bloody aspirin to it and carry on with the duty at hand and it’d never occurred to me to do otherwise!
But it was that second observation of hers that has really stuck with me through the years and she’s one of the few who ever picked up on my tendency to go for quality amongst friends rather than quantity.
Then there are those friends amongst those select few that managed to make it past all my defences (of which there were many and still are if we’re honest about it) straight to my heart who transcended mere friendship to being just as much family to me as those born to it.
These are the ones that I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that it may well have only been hours since we last talked or several years but that should I be in need of someone that I can count on and could and more importantly would trust with my life, I know I can reach out to them and they’ll be there no matter what the distance or what it might require.
Whenever I’ve felt I’m approaching the end of my rope, knowing that they exist and I can count on them as one of my articles of faith is what helps me once again pick up the sword and shield and confront what challenges lay before me.
It’s been exceptionally rare that I’ve had to avail myself of that privilege (and the one time in recent memory, I was called out for being a stooge for trying to be all kinds of stubborn about solving the problem my way and rightfully so!) but knowing it was an option that was available to me was often all I really needed.
Knowing that there were people in this world that would not stop until they’d found me and brought me home and that they know full well that should I ever be required to return the favour, well the nice thing about most roads is that they tend to go both ways.
Even if it’s been a while since we’ve had some time to talk as if no time had passed, I do tend to think of those I’ve called friend often and that usually does the trick of putting right what may well have gone wrong that day.
I hope that everyone in this world has a few very special ones of their own in their lives for they are one of the greatest gifts this world has to offer us mere mortals and make the journey that much more enjoyable and fulfilling. 🙂