A few days ago I got a call that went something like this, “Hello?”
“Is this
“Yes?”
“This is Richard Lacher.”
“No kiddin’! Where the hell are you?”
“I’m down the road from you in
Long story short, we agreed to meet at the Cracker Barrel in Harriman Tuesday evening and reminisce. So, we did just that!
The last time Richard and I saw each other was about 1964, just before I joined the Air Force. My cousin Mark and I (click for a flash back) drove from
After forty-four years we still hit it off and seemed to pick right up where we left off! I thoroughly enjoyed the couple of hours we spent setting on the front porch of the Cracker Barrel asking each other, “Do you remember…?” and “Didn’t we once…?” Man that felt so good!
There has hardly been an event in my life that I hadn’t wished Richard was there. When you have a close friend that you grew up with, you want them to experience everything you did and that’s just the way I’ve always felt. I suppose part of the reason I wrote all my “Laugh & Times” was in hopes that one day Richard would come along and get caught up on all I wished he had experienced with me!
I told him about “Mushy’s” and gave him one of my “Blogness Cards”, so hopefully he’ll soon be checking out all the great stories he was partly responsible for me writing. Posts like “Cuddles and Puddles”, “Ol’ Smiley Burnette Got the Drop on Me”, “Night Moves”, “My Hands Felt Just Like Two Balloons”, “Breaking Into the Outhouse”, “The Mockingbird”, and “A Scout is Friendly, Courteous, & Kind”.
Richard and I lived in the Mockingbird Trailer Park in Florence, Alabama together twice and in Waverly, Tennessee once over a span of about five or six years. He and I went through puberty together, so, as you can imagine, we analyzed everything, but we were definitely “working on mysteries without any clues!” These were probably the most important years of our teenage life, and it really hurt when our families finally had to go different directions.
Hopefully now Richard and I can relive the past years, catch up on the lost forty plus years, and even renew our friendship. We have a lot of catching up to do!
Thanks buddy for making the effort and taking the time to give me that call.
