Goodbye, My Friend

This morning, a good friend of mine died.

I met James in January of 2004. He was the maintenance man at the trailer park where my wife and our pets and I lived for 6 months when we first moved to the Sunshine State.

Everyone in the park knew him and he was everyone’s friend — a kind, softspoken man who was always happy to help anyone in need, and never asked for anything in return.

He and his wife, Kathy, became our landlords a few months later, when they offered to rent their second trailer home to us after the trailer park’s owners suddenly decided to sell our original rented trailer home out from under us without any warning.

James and Kathy became our good friends in September of that year, when James spent a week helping me board up our newly purchased dream home in preparation for the 4 hurricanes of the 2004 hurricane season. Then they and their constant and devoted companions, their 2 dogs, Lulu and Shorty, evacuated their trailer and stayed with us in our new home during the hurricanes. Regular readers of this Journal may remember that I wrote about our adventures several times back then.

Since then, my wife and I spent many happy hours with James and Kathy.

And I am very blessed to have known him.

Here’s a motivational poster that I made back in 2006, using a photo that I took of James in 2004, riding his “Easy Rider” adult tricycle that he had tricked-out with a super-long front fork and a La-Z-Boy chair:

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Tags:
Friends, History, Images, Inspirational, Personal, Pets, Survivors

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 15th, 2010 at 5:44 pm.