Business and pleasure.
Coworkers and friends.
Life.
It all becomes intertwined. The line of business associate and friend gets blurred over time. People I talk to on the phone are not strangers or disembodied voices, we talk bikes, we share stories about our families and we discuss life in general.
These connections, no matter how tenuous, become so important and so routine. On Tuesdays, I call Bob every morning. I generally expect to see Fred a couple times a week in our front office.
There are two stories today...
...
My morning to call to my best shop in New Hampshire and possibly our best shop on the east coast resulted in me listening to a broadcast message about a family emergency. When I got through to the owner, I found out he had lost his brother.
I was at a loss for words. So I tried to get him to talk about his brother, what he did, where he grew up. Simple math puts his brother in his mid-40's. The death was unexpected. But we shared a few chuckles and did our best to forget about work for those few moments.
My heart is with you, my friend. And I reflect a bit on the fact that as I continue to grow older, it will ultimately be my friends and family I will have to say goodbye to.
"Don't stop this train..."
...
I was reminded that there was a brief moment in time when I thought about joining the military. I had just read
this article about the son of the buyer at our best US dealer. His father did not sleep for days after reading the story.
As graduation from college grew close, I didn't know what I was going to do with my life and I was looking for career opportunities. I was interested in EMT and Paramedic fields but was worried they would get boring over time. As I continued to look for potential jobs, I considered the military and found a group in the Air Force whose motto was, "That others may live." That drew me in and as I began to see the training they went through, I thought if there was one part of the military branch I could go into, that would be it.
Seems like a long time ago....
