Funny Stories

If you gotta play at garden parties
I wish you a lotta luck
But if memories were all I sang
I'd rather drive a truck

I'm thinking I've run this reunion thing dry. What kind of person goes around telling funny stories about people he knew fifty years ago? Our high school class is just a tiny sliver of the people we've known in our lives. And when we were at Hillsboro, a lot of the people we hung with were in classes other than ours, anyway. I'm thinking that I might want to talk about some of them, sometime. And I've known a lot of people who've never heard of John Koen. I might want to get sentimental about some of them, too.

Just a little earlier tonight, I started thinking about a guy I used to know at work. He was five or ten years my senior; big, tall and hulking, but also an incredibly gentle human being. I never saw him without a smile on his face, but he always seemed sad to me. His name was Tom Leonard.

I decided, just now, to google his name, with "CDC" as a qualifier. The first hit showed a URL for a CDC site and this citation: "There has been no official Tree planting for Tom Leonard." That didn't sound good. I went to the page and, sure enough, it was all about the suicide of Tom Leonard. But, on closer examination, the Tom Leonard who committed suicide was a teenage boy. It was a wrenching site, but it wasn't the Tom Leonard that I knew.

The funny thing is, if it had been the Tom Leonard I knew, I wouldn't have been surprised.