The pool without John ain't what it used to be. Sure, I know lots of good folks and am friendly with a few but that exceptional relationship only occurs a very few times in the life of lucky people.
His son phoned me a couple of weeks ago to say that the hospice where John died was having a memorial evening and reception in memory of those who had died recently. He invited me to attend and I did. I know all his five children and they marveled as do I at the closeness of our late-life friendship. Not many people are fortunate enough to forge such a friendship at our advanced age.
"We all wondered how two such different guys could have such a close relationship?" his daughter said to me at the reception. It's true. He was an observant Christian (though I was never able to find out to exactly what specific order). I am an non-observant Jew, so we had some good religious discussions. He used to say to me ,"If you are right I have nothing to lose, if I'm right you're in big trouble!"
In politics he leaned left, I leaned right. We discussed those topics too, occasionally generating more heat than light, but that didn't matter either. We discussed other things too, that I'm not going to tell you about here and we were never, ever, Politically Correct.
We had a lot of laughs. He told me cop stories, I told him doc stories and we were old enough to laugh at our youthful mistakes and misadventures that had long since ceased to be sources of embarrassment. When recounting stories of some of the things that didn't work out he would say, "failure, the second best lesson!"
Most of those discussions took place in various inexpensive restaurants nearby wherever we had been swimming. (see above photo) For a while I took notes and when the waitress inquired what I was doing John would tell them, "my friend is a blog writer, he's probably going to write up your restaurant." Needless to say, he didn't tell them that my blog only had a half-dozen followers!
Given his talent for exaggerating a little in his story telling, John, whose surname was Dell, would maintain they were not exaggerations at all, they were just 'enDELLishments.
Sometimes when we were lunching out my daughter in Toronto would phone. I would immediately lose the phone while they chatted away for a few minutes. John and Rena never met, but when his son was playing in a production of 'Les Mis' in To, he presented Rena and Bill with tickets.
In the last few months when he wasn't up to swimming we played a lot of pool. He was quite a good pool player despite having very poor vision in one eye. When he played a particularly brilliant shot, he would turn to face me and triumphantly announce,"Not bad for a blind man!"
Despite multiple medical disorders, he never complained, (except to swear mildly when he couldn't do something he thought he should have been able to) He continued planning and doing for as long as he could.
In true Churchillian fashion he never surrendered; he never gave up.
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