Memories...

"I cannot say, and I will not say
That he is dead. He is just away.
With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand,
He has wandered into an unknown land..."

~ James Whitcomb Riley

My friend Phil passed away last night. I'm still trying to process that fact.

I met Phil 28 years ago when I brought my son to OK Adcock Elementary School for the first day of fourth grade.  Jason was supposed to be in another class, but I asked the principal put my son in Mr. G's class.

"We don't do requests," the principal told me.
"I'm sure you can somehow do it this time," I insisted. "I want a teacher who will challenge him."

I won, although I like to think that it was Jason who won in the long run.  Mr. G was the type of teacher who challenged his students to think and do.  Those kids learned, and they loved doing it.

After that school year, Phil, Mike, and I became friends. When we moved from Las Vegas to Nashville some years later, Phil came to visit us every summer when school was out.  Whenever we were in Las Vegas, we were sure to see him.  Phil always joked that he was always afraid when I came back to Las Vegas because it always meant that he would have some home improvement project to complete.

In truth, each time I visited, he always decided he had to paint a room or put up wallpaper.

"I think you just want cheap labor," I told him as I helped paint his "small" family room one time.

"You have better taste than I do," he replied.  Apparently, though, I didn't have the good sense to talk him out of some of his schemes.  One time I told him I had seen a photo of a white bedroom with paint spatters on the accent wall.  He liked that idea and decided that he was going to do that in one of his extra bedrooms.  The bedroom in question was white, and he had black accents in the room.

"You aren't going to do black are you?" I know I probably frowned.

"No," he replied. "I already bought red paint."  He covered the carpet with plastic, poured a bit of the red paint in a cup, and tossed it at the wall.  SPLAT. The red exploded on the spot it hit. Drip. It rolled down the wall.  SPLAT.  Another red bomb exploded. Drip.  SPLAT. Drip. All across the 12-feet of wall he had red splats that dripped down.  It looked like he had murdered someone on that wall.

"Phil," I tried to be gentle, "you really need to throw the paint in another direction so it doesn't look quite like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre on that wall."  He loved that wall, though. I wasn't quite as fond of it and was happy when he moved to a new house a few years later.

When he would come to visit us in Nashville, we would let him use one of our cars. One time he was driving on West End Blvd. when a policeman pulled him over.  He had not been speeding or doing anything wrong, so he was a bit surprised.

"What did I do wrong, officer?" he asked when the cop approached the car.

"Your license plate is expired," the officer replied.

"It's not my car."  Phil explained that his friends had let him drive the car, and he showed his license and the car registration.

"You must have some kind of friends that let you drive a car that is six months late for license plates," the officer laughed.  He also let Phil off and gave us a warning to update the plates.  Oops.

Another time, Phil and I toured the Jack Daniels Distillery in Coffee County, TN.  The tour begins with a short film about the place, and in it, employees talk about what they do.  One of the men talked about how they use "purr" water to get a "purr" product.

"Purr water," Phil choked and started laughing.  Loudly.  I laughed at him.  People turned to look at us because we were laughing very loudly.

"You're not from around here, are ya?" a woman asked, but Phil and I were still laughing so hard we couldn't answer.  We laughed through the rest of the film and as we walked out of the doors towards the tour train.  We were bent over from laughter, and I could barely breathe.

Phil suddenly stopped. "My contacts," he spit out.  We had to stop so he could get his contact lens back in his eye, so we missed our train.   The tour guide told us we'd have to wait for the next tour.

"I can't go through the film again," Phil wheezed. He was still laughing, and I was still laughing at him.  The guide thought it best that we wait outside until the film was over so we didn't interrupt the next showing with our hysterics.

Phil's birthday, 2015

When we moved back to Las Vegas in 2009, our friendship got stronger. We had differing views on religion and politics, but our friendship always was more important to both of us than either of those other things were. We always had more fun laughing about good things than anything else. He was a great cook, and we enjoyed dinners with him at his home or at ours.  We went to shoot photos in Utah and at Strip locations. We played golf a few times. We celebrated with him when he retired from teaching last June.

Phil was in the hospital two weeks ago, and we spoke everyday while he was in and everyday once he got out. He called me last Wednesday to see if Mike and I could go to lunch, but I was too sick.  "We'll go when we get back from Ohio," I told him.

We won't get that chance.

We're in shock.  I can't say he was in the best of health because, quite frankly, he had a lot of little health problems over the past few months.

"I don't think I'm going to last long," he said to me in October.

"Quit talking like that," I admonished him. "The doctor will figure this out."

The doctor didn't figure it out, and my friend is gone.

His passing has left a large hole in our hearts.

Rest peacefully, my dear friend.