An old friend came to visit today. I don’t see him often, and when he approached my door I was unsure who he was. He is a few years younger than I, but when we were children I used to go to school with his older brothers, Dick, Arthur, and David, who was about my age. Their family lived a couple of miles from where my family farmed.
While I spent some 15 years in the military service, the younger pair, George and Larry grew to manhood. The youngest of the family, Larry married a young lady named Elizabeth from Tappan, NY, near where Larry had been working in a hospital.
When I left the military service I owned a home on the Dezell Road that my family lived in for exactly six years. Larry and Liz bought a home directly across the road from me where they lived with their two children. During that period the two families were great friends, and shared many an evening with the elders chatting and drinking coffee, while the children played together.
Then we moved a few miles away, closer to where I had been brought up. Within a year or two Larry and Liz also moved away from the Dezell Road home. We didn’t see each other much for many years. As they lived some forty miles away, we saw them only a few times over the ensuing years. Two years ago I drove to their home for a pleasant two hour visit one fine afternoon, and I’d not seen them since, but now and again I thought of our old friends and neighbors.
This morning, as he climbed my front steps I wondered who he was, although he seemed very familiar. Then he spoke and I instantly knew. He entered and drank a cup of coffee with Nora and I, and it was as if he had been here yesterday. Before leaving I offered him the use of our bathroom as it didn’t seem fair to feed him coffee and then send him on his way with a full bladder. He took me up on the offer, and when he returned to the kitchen where Nora and I remained he spoke, “That room that is now your bathroom used to be my bedroom,” for this is the very same home that he was raised in.
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