A Tribute to a Great Friend

Gary Allen Wilson 1951-2004

As I drove to work this morning my mind wandered to all sorts of things. I had a brief moment wherein I felt happy ... happy at the thought of doing something that I WANT to do and that comes natural for me. It dawned on me this morning that only we humans fret and struggle to find our "niche" in this life. The animal kingdom, they never struggle with "mid life crisis" and all that shit. They are born. They perform their tasks that come innately for them. They perform all this flawlessly and with grace and beauty and then they die. Perhaps they die content. The raccoon that I saw dead on the side of the road this morning, do you think he worried about mid life crisis? Did he have a warning of the impending doom that was to face him? Do raccoons believe in the afterlife? I'm inclined to say no but then again I've never talked to a raccoon to understand their noetic structure on things eternal. It may very well be that they too look forward to retiring to a place where there are no cars or trucks speeding along the road but instead field of trash bins loaded with goodies and not a lid in sight. Raccoon heaven.

My best friend in college died last week. His adopted son, Nathan, wrote to tell me; the letter arrived yesterday. Died Tuesday, buried Friday. I was Gary's best man in his wedding back in the early 80's when I was still running around Boston trying to figure out what to do with myself. The last time I saw Gary was in 2003. I drove up to Salisbury, Maryland where I found him in a nursing home room, stretched out, thin legs, shriveled up and not looking at all like the long-haired hippie he was before he got "saved" and went to Bible college to become a preacher -which incidentally he never did follow through with.

The only means of communication I had with him at the time was via a computer screen. He could pick out letters on the monitor suspended above him via eye movement and could thereby make simple short, abbreviated sentences. It's all we had. Gary was an intellectual, a lover of music and a bibliophile of the highest order. Rarely did you find him without a book. In fact as I recall he had a method of reading where he read from a different book each day. What a guy!. My earliest recollection of him was sitting in his rocking chair in a college dorm listening to Vivaldi's Four Seasons and just a rockin' back and forth. Whenever I hear Vivaldi's Four Seasons I stop and think of Gary who evolved from being a classic 60s hippie to a raving evangelical fundamentalist in the 80s to a relaxed beer drinker and avid fan of Neil Young in the 90s. The last thing we did together while he was still up and around was watch a Neil Young concert together. I guess you can say we both evolved. Life's like that. It's about evolution, growth, adapting, change, and hopefully love. Gary Allen Wilson. May he rest in peace.