One of the interesting thing about school friends is that years later they pop up and you're a kid all over again. That happened to me last week when Bob showed up at my door 50 years later and two states away. We were HS friends in 1950 and 1951 in Fort Pierce, Florida.

The third member of our group was George who was missing for 24 years when he called me about 5 years ago. Bob stayed here in Tennessee a couple of days and then took off for Florida to see George. I'm hoping the three of us can get together sometime soon.

As you might suspect, Bob and I (We called him Robert back then.) talked almost non-stop about the good old days, and things that have happened since then. There were stories about the Famous James, an English-built motorcycle that I sold him before we moved to Tennessee.

We talked about other classmates. Molly and David are gone now, he said. They were two of the funniest people I ever knew. David died young, but Molly only recently.

We discussed the rodeo that was held most Saturdays out on Orange Avenue. And we mentioned how we almost lived at the beach. We both took our first and only driver's test at the community center. I took mine in a car in 1949 and it consisted of four right turns and a stop at the curb. His was on the Infamous James a year later. He made the same four right turns.

I went into teaching and Bob was an engineer. George was a surveyor. All of us are retired now. We all have the travel bug. Bob and I are grandfathers. I'm the only one of the three who looks different. I got a little plump and my hair is thinning, but Bob and George look pretty much the same as they did in the middle of the last century.

My Junior and Senior years of high school were spent in Nashville. I had two close friends there too. They were Lee and Nathan. Both died young.

I hope those of you who are still in school will enjoy your friends now. They might just disappear sometime soon.
Howard