My best friend and I were active disc golfers. We were young, broke husbands and young, inexperienced fathers. During the 1990's before it became as easy as firing off an email to make plans, we'd chat on the phone about the the two young daughters, the wives, the work, the motorcycles and make grandiose plans about where our next disc golf adventure would take us. It was a mutual bond for a couple guys who were not that into sports.
Reality was much less romantic but none less enjoyable. I'd ride up to College Station on Friday after work and we'd get up to play a couple rounds at Research Park before heading back to his house where the families would be waiting for us and we'd have lunch. The young girls would play in the back yard and he and I would fiddle around with the guitars, listen to Undertow, Dead Can Dance and Jaco.
I hadn't thought about he and I in years in part because those days I was still a broken young man trying hard to hold it together. But, between he and my wife, I started the long process of incremental heeling and trying to be better. Failing a few times along the way but I tried because I knew he tried too.
I also hadn't thought of him because in 1998, near the birth of each of our second children, he and I were in a single car accident. He was killed instantly just inches from me and I struggle with not remembering the chaotic moments that followed the accident. I want to remember him smiling and playing. Getting pissed at hitting a tree or infuriated at dropping one in the pond. But the images him there and his struggle and his look...fuck.
We were on our way to play a round of disc golf at the same park on an early Saturday morning when it happened. I reflected fondly for a moment of playing with him and how many damned discs we lost but always dove in to recover...and coming up with a selection of discs, none of which ever seemed to be ours.
I have a few pictures of him in a memory box my wife created. I have a video of the time I paid for him to go up for a joy ride in a small airplane at a local airport. But in my closet I also have one or two of the discs he left in the saddlebags of my motorcycle the last time we went disc golfing and drove into the middle of nowhere to some farm to play a round wading through knee high prairie grass and get chased by carpenter bees. His name and phone number remain on the bottom side of the discs.
My son is named after him and on every anniversary of his death I allow myself grieve a little bit more for another day. But I miss him and miss him more than i have in years in seeing this. This February it will have been 17 years since he left his young family and a boy who needed, very simply, a good friend. He was one of the two people who saved me...and he never knew it.