sammy

Yesterday as I was reading the obituaries, a name popped out at me. It was such a shock that I said aloud... "Oh my God." I thought "this has to be another person with the same name", but no it was my buddy. An old friend from high school and college days... Just a year older than me... congestive heart failure. I've been thinking all day about what to write about my old pal. Not that I was having trouble coming up with memories... it's just that there are so many. We had a lot of fun times. Unfortunately, we fell out of contact over the last few years. I'd known Kelly since early grade school in Ford. When the school closed there, he went to Bucklin and I went to Mullinville, but during our sophomore year, we became good friends and along with another guy from Ford, we were pretty much inseperable for several years. Kelly, Ray and I spent a lot of days swimming, going to movies, going out on group dates with girlfriends of the moment. Some of the best times we had though, were dove hunting. Now, anyone who knows anything about dove hunting will tell you that unless you are a really good shot, (which none of us really were) it's difficult to shoot a dove on the wing. But ya know, they're pretty easy to hit on a power line. Whatta ya mean illegal? We were young and invincible. Anyway, we used to not only hunt birds off the power lines, we used to do it while driving down the road in this 1960 something Oldsmobile that I used to drive. I know, I know... very illegal and not very sporting, but damn fun. This one day I was driving down the road with Ray and Kelly on the hood of the car, shotguns at the ready. (This is my favorite memory of hunting with those guys). Anyway, For some reason I stepped on the brake hard enough to make them slide off the hood. Well, instead of keeping my foot on the brake, I let off right away and the car was just coasting along real slow. You know when you have something following you so close that all you can do is just take little steps to keep ahead of it, because if you take a big step, it'll catch your foot? So, here is this car driving down the road. Two guys holding shotguns right in front of the car, taking these little ballerina steps as fast as they can, shouting at the top of their lungs... "Stop, Stop." And me inside the car laughing so hard I can't even find the brake let alone step on it. Man, I'll be able to picture that until the day I die. It still makes me laugh out loud. Kelly and I also used to sing together a lot. Not perform, but just sing for the joy of it. We sang "It used to be her town too", for ourselves more times than I can count. We didn't have the sheet music or the background music. Just did it a cappella. Kelly sang the James Taylor part, I did J.D. Souther's part. We were good too. I wish I had kept in touch... His Mom asked me to sing at the funeral, and I decided to sing one of the songs a cappella... Just for him. God speed Kelly.