OCEAN MEMORIES

This letter is my response to my great friend from college, Fred Holt...
For his digital birthday card on my latest birthday on 1-21-2014!

Hey Fred... we had some GOOD times in college, and after college, back in the days of crazy Fayetteville, North Carolina! Time and distance can make old best friends grow in different directions but the core of their friendship can always remain a solid mass of what made them friends in the first place. And the times when they get together can be better times, indeed.

Fayetteville, and FSU, were rough on me, as you know. You will be shocked at my personality differences when we finally get together in the future, but at the core of my being... I have fought the harsh realities of life to retain the fantasy loving core I enclose in a sometimes hard exterior.

You have my son to eventually meet. And you have a lot of explaining about your “Washington Deadskins!”

Hey... I would not be who I am, inside and out, if I had never met you on the campus of Fayetteville State University those long decades ago. I loved you then and I love you now... and we will get the chance to hang out as time gets along. My parents are back down in the Holden’s Beach area... and hopefully soon, within a year or three, we will all have to converge down there in what has to be one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

Standing with  bare feet on that beautiful white beach sand along the miles of Holden Beach area and scanning the VAST Atlantic Ocean as that mind altering ocean breeze washes over you is a primal image that burns itself onto the photo cells of the walls of your soul! I think about it every day, as I often lament to my mother when I call her.

I remember, after I graduated, I would spend HOURS AND HOURS sitting on the piers and sitting in the gazebos and walking along the beach with a pen and writing pad in hand... absorbing the mystical magical energy from OFF THE OCEAN!

WOW!

I envision all of us, someday, sitting around together on the beach on an excellent Summer day and experiencing all that I just remembered... so that we can all reconnect like nature has planned for humans to to -- right there on the edge of the ocean!

Thanks for the birthday acknowledgment, Fred. I hope all of this content shows my feeling toward you and our memories from the past. Take care and I’ll get back at you very soon.

RLJ

PS. This is an inside caveat to our relationship... but we both remember Rochelle. A normal dysfunctional friendship would have been torn apart by the fact that one of us saw, and talked to her first... but she ultimately choose to connect and hang out with the other one, instead. The one who did not get the girl absolutely had not ONE problem with the way that it all turned out. And, our relationship was NOT torn apart by a SMOKING HOT SUPERBABE who was really, in the end, only right for one of us.

The one that got the girl could handle her. The other one absolutely would have been destroyed by her! And the other one had no problem with it all. And that is part of our friendship in a shell!