We were best friends for seventy years. Seventy years! There are only two reasons I didn't drop out of Clinton (Iowa) High School. Basketball and girls. And Tom B. introduced me to both when we were classmates at Hawthorne Elementary School. He also introduced me to new kinds of fun growing up - cherry bombs and mailboxes, ropes and car bumpers, hanging classmates out of second-story windows. More, but I can't even begin to list them, even though the statutes of limitations have run out. He taught me plausible deniability. Turns out his law degree was useful to me, too.
His sense of humor was at his very core, as was his kindness, not to mention his considerable skills in golf and bridge, two pastimes he vainly tried to teach me. As we aged and he remained in Iowa and I moved to North Carolina, then Georgia, and now South Carolina, we still managed to keep in touch via emails and rare visits. When his vision began to falter, I would give him a call to just "touch base for a few minutes," and so we "touched base" for an hour and a half and, at some point, he would have me laughing until I cried reminiscing about crazy things we had done and said. But now there are no more phone calls, Tom. Still there are tears, but of a different kind. Not many people get to enjoy a best friend for seventy years, but I did. Call me blessed.
