Smile A Little

“I found a picture of you, ooooooohhhhh…

Those were the happiest days of my life.”

~ The Pretenders

So now comes the time for reminiscing. I found a picture that Dale took of me with his Samsung Galaxy when we were replacing the fuel pump on my old Chevy. The date on this picture is April 23, 2022; 367 days later, my friend would be gone.

Grief can be an academically fascinating thing, should you be able to step outside of yourself and observe it when it is upon you. Things that seem trite become profound. I am thinking at the moment of the old saw that you should never miss an opportunity to tell the people you care about how much they mean to you. Every chance you get, tell your friends that you love them and appreciate them, because every chance you get may be your last chance.

I am down in the toy room tonight for first time since I learned that I’d lost my friend. To say this has been a tough week would be an understatement. Ironic that I was about to post the results of the year’s first 32 car tournament when everything stopped. I have the music on and am chatting here and there with friends and family via text and trying to make sense of things. I think maybe I’ll open a package tonight; I certainly have enough of them, as a lot of new toys have been piling up while I’ve had my head down. It might be nice to see what I got and what I can do with it.

There’s no forgetting, of course; you can’t forget when you’ve lost someone that meant so much to you, and I am surrounded here by the things that Dale and I worked on together. But that is as it should be, isn’t it? When someone makes your life a better place, its fitting that they leave much behind.

So I try to smile a little, and hope that Dale knew how much he meant to me. I try to take a little comfort in knowing that his pain is now over. and I hope that someday he and I can hang out again, drink a Prost, smoke a pipe, and talk about cars and history and space travel and all the things we loved.

Go ahead. Smile. Open a package. Try to play. Those who have moved on would want us to enjoy the time we have left. That way, we’ll have a lot more to talk about when we meet again.

^{Opened this cool premium “70 Years” -series Matchbox MGB GT, now in the inspection area}