SOMETIMES BLOGGING PAYS OFF- -BIG

Obviously I am not talking about money or my blog would never have gaps in it, but payoffs can be big in other ways. Day before yesterday someone called my home in Georgia and left a number where he could be reached. My oldest son, who is chaperoning our home in Georgia while we loll about iin Washington immediately gave me a call and gave me the number.

I was riding around with my wife and daughter in law, on our way to Costco in Oregon (and a couple of Good Wills along the way) to get a line on some cheap stuff. The name associated with the number was Don, who was the close friend in Idaho in 1951 or 52 whose Ford I was driving when I learned to quit smoking a second and final time (back in the archives, I know not where). He was one of the closest friends I have ever had, though we lost contact when, after graduation, he went into the navy and I went to college.

I have googled his name, and otherwise tried to find him on and off the internet with no success at all. I had decided that I was unlikely to ever make contact because we are both over 75 years old and a lot of my other friends from that period have left this life for another. When I got the number, I called it immediately and locked on to one of the longest ‘bull sessions” of my life. The wife and daughter in law kept finding interesting place to go, but I was locked on the cell phone and statyed there interminably (in their opinion). A discovery like this can only be appreciated by a couple of coots. Somehow the friends of one’s youth are among the best friends ever, but often they are locked away by failing memories or failure to renew contact when the vigor of youth has expired. Their absence leave a hole which is like an ichy sore which is scratched but never appeased.

It turned out that “Don” had not been looking for me. Like me, he had given up, but he was trying to complete a journal of his 76 years, and was looking for pictures. He googled the name Sorenson which was the name of one of his relatives for which he and I had worked in the summer and fall of 1951. I had blogged (several years ago) about the time, while working for Sorenson, had backed a dump truck too close to they side of a basement we were digging, and the side had begun to cave in, so they got the shovel of a payloader under the side of the truck to keep it out of the hole, and the whole crew lost a day of work getting past my screw up. In looking for something about Sorenson Construction he had come upon my blog post (About which he muttered that I didn’t maintain my blog very well—a just critique) and from my blog, he found me.

I will have to say honestly that if no one else had ever looked at my blog, this renewal of acquaintance was worth all the effort I have ever put in it. (Even if it means that I shall now have to be much more thoughtful of the accuracy of any posts that include him. I do tend, occasionally to let my imagination fill in when my memory gets sloppy.)

It is a happy day, and now I have got to figure out a way to get together and introduce our wives (obviously wise women, both) to each other.