My Friends

I am fortunate not only in having a wonderful family around me daily, but I also share the world with a long list of people, many of whom are just as happy to be left out of this litany of appreciations. Here are just a few . . .

My Co-Workers
I work with some pretty strange but talented people. We're the folks who push boxes of computer equipment into classrooms & help people with deep educations figure out which buttons to push.
   It took me a while to figure out just how lucky I am. I work with people whose talent is marvelous and complex. I enjoy the company & conversations with educators, maintenance folks, the folks who sweep the stairs and the folks who live in dusty offices full of fire-code violations. These are the people who support me, who make my job not just interesting but important. I like to say that we are ones who help make learning happen. And it's more than just a slogan. It's what we do.

Frank Donckers
Out of all the guys I'd known on the USS Saratoga, Frank Donckers was one of those I'd call a close shipmate. We drank together, we talked about good and bad, we staggered around the Mediterranean. And it was Frank who turned me on to the Dionysis Restaurant on the hillside across from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. There were things about which we disagreed, but we were, like the rest of the guys in CR Division, shipmates. Cover each other. A hand through a hatchway as the compartment starts to flood.
   Over the course of the past thirty some years, Frank and I have made a few efforts to keep in touch. The recent military action in the Middle East has set that link up again. Through it all, we have our own sense of pride.
   I know that my father was proud of me to be in uniform. I know that Frank was proud of the uniform he wore. You can see that pride in the picture of Frank and his daughter, Jessica, that's posted here.

Ron & Joyce Brown
Ron was a shipmate in Puerto Rico. Just before I got transferred to the USS Saratoga, Ron married Joyce & the two of them had a place off base for a while. Many years after I'd been out of the USN, I found Ron's phone number & gave him a call. We've exchanged a couple half-dozen Christmas cards & a few letters & emails. Last summer Cindy & I and Andy visited them for a couple days at their digs in northeastern Colorado. Ron is among a few folks from my time in the USN whom I remember as a true friend. Each of us has been through a lot over the distance of years and miles, but we are still on the same boat together.

Dave Petreman
I first met Dave Petreman when he walked into the audio-visual repair shop at Wright State University with a question about his cassette tape recorder. If memory serves, he had taken his academic credentials as a sign that he no longer had to read instruction manuals for anything he bought, used or tried to operate. Over the 15 years since that day, I have worked to knock some of the glitter off Dave's PhD. In return, Dave has left some of that intellectual fervor on me. It was an even trade, as I see it. Dave reawakened my interest in linguistics & literature, and introduced me to the writing of so many Latin American authors that the reading of their words has changed my life forever.
   If I am el gringo errante, it is because Dave has shown me how much I already was and made my being that particular gringo one of the best changes that my life has seen. David e yo somos juntos hermanos de la vida estrañada y la vida fantasma, vivos en un mundo de sueños y realidades, de palabras y lagrimas, de flores y abismos, estamos vivos.

John Huffstot
This is a long story. It starts in Navy boot camp & ends up collected in a whole pile of exchanged emails between Portugal & la estancia.
   John had the strange luck of being picked as RCPO in bootcamp. He was the recruit in charge of the rest of the recruits. Like I said, it's a long story. But it's interesting in that one afternoon a couple years back, I got an email from John. Out of the blue he found his name on one of my web pages & sent me an email, checking in. The email had a Portuguese domain code on it. That piqued my interest, eh?
   Well, it turns out that John had been living in Portugal for close to two decades & was teaching at a university in Lisbon. He'd stumbled upon my ham radio web pages and chastised me for not doing more writing. (I thought I was doing well just to get these & other pages up & running!)
   Since that time I've often started out on an email to John in pretty much the same "out of the blue" mode as his first electronic epistle to me. Sometimes I even throw some of my Borinqueño Spanish on him. Sometimes he responds in Portuguese, which gets me shuffling through dictionaries. Along the way it's been an interesting re-establishment of a friendship that started under none the best conditions nearly four decades back.
   I always figure that, should I get the time & money, I'm gonna get on a plane & go to Iberia, if for no other reason than to walk into John's office unannounced & give him my best "lost Puertorican" impersonation.
   Maybe he won't recognize me from the pictures I had up a while back of the family winter-time vacation to Puerto Rico. Now that, that is another story . . .

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