As I share life with Mike long after our competitive days, I appreciate more and more the odd, interesting, and fulfilling paths that we all travel, whether planned or not.
Soon following our move to Lake Norman almost five years ago, my wife Mary Ann looked for a representative for a particular beauty product she used. Scanning a long list of salespeople, she randomly chose one and called her. After their long conversation had finished, Mary Ann came to the library to tell me how pleasant Terri, the saleswoman, was and how much she looked forward to working with her.
It was then that her phone rang, and Terri asked, “Did you say your husband’s name was Roger?”
In 1823 the English Romantic poet, Lord Byron, wrote his satirical poem, Don Juan, in which he writes: “‘Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction; if it could be told….” Over the years, many other writers have expressed the same idea in various words but, no matter what version is written, all readers eventually learn the truth of Byron’s words.
There it was for me, strange but true, and life, not fiction. Terri’s husband and I had wrestled against each other for two years in high school in the same weight class. And, now, two years over fifty years ago, we meet again–just not on a wrestling mat.
We four of us had the obligatory lunch to meet and talk and explore. Mike and I then continued sharing lunches, coffee in my shop, and beyond, discovering that we had much in common. Both of our hometowns had been textile towns. Our parents had worked in the mills and we resided in mill houses. So much, besides wrestling, shared.
View of Lake Norman, NC (photo, Our State.com)
Each week he would call and ask, “Want a coffee?” then, in a few minutes, he would appear with a soda for himself and the promised coffee for me. Each weekly visit found Mike helping me with some project in the yard or my shop. A trained engineer, he made certain a project was correct and safe. Exact, even. He would rake the abundant pine needles fallen from the 42 pine trees in our yard to use for mulch in his gardens.
Our weekly visit often included lunch and, when we ate at his favorite fast-food eatery, he would pull a rash of coupons from a pocket before paying and say, “A poor man spends money like he is rich, but a rich man spends it like he is poor.” Then as we ate as some finer points of theology or politics would be discussed.
I will always remember how he once looked at me during one of these “discussions” and asked, “Are you that naïve?”
When I work with a project on the deck that he more or less built, or move in my wheelchair around the yard gleaning pine cones, I see Mike’s presence. The bluebird nesting box with the red roof still graces the pine tree where he fastened it after I “mentioned” to him how it needed to be there. When I admired a long row of irises in a neighbor’s yard, I asked Mike one day as we returned from a road trip to knock on the unreachable (for my wheelchair) door to inquire if I could have some.
Projects together (photo courtesy Page & Spine: Fiction Showcase)
The kind lady permitted me to take what I wanted, and now next to the back garden gate is a small, varied-colored growth of purple irises that Mike and I planted, and, like our friendship, it grows and thickens and blooms.
Both our lives, like all lives, have had their dips and twists and failures and mountaintops. But for two boys from the mill hills of small textile towns, we have been blessed and have done well. And as I share life with Mike long after our competitive days, I appreciate more and more the odd, interesting, and fulfilling paths that we all travel, whether planned or not.
Mary Ann and I moved to Lake Norman not knowing that the “Stranger than fiction” of Byron would happen and that a friendship would be forged out of a time long ago when two scrappy, mill-hill boys competed against each other. Byron also writes that “…truth is always strange.”
He’s right, of course, but not always in the way it may appear. It’s not strange that Mike and I respected each other then. Nor is it strange that there is something deeper now.
