Eugene

There is a certain ethereal plane of friendship where you can pick up a conversation as though you’d just left the room for a few minutes, even after a gap of several years. This is how it feels when I get back together with Dana, my roommate from college, and his wife Muffin, both of whom I’ve known for a few more than forty years.

For that reason, alone, our visit was wonderful. Food and conversation, catching up, exchanging stories, just hanging out and visiting with old friends like these were still the old times. Fantastic! I’m not going to make this post about that, though.

The last time we all got together was about 5 years ago. Sue and I had undertaken a west-coast road trip via airplane and rental car, sort of a precursor to what we’re doing now, and we stopped to see Dana and Muffin and Kirby the Wonderdog at their home in Eugene. This turned out to have some interesting consequences down the road (so to speak) because one of the things we did with my former classmates was to go on a daytrip to the Oregon coast in their camper, a motorhome. It was my first time in such a vehicle, and I thought it was surprisingly and exceptionally cool. So cool, in fact, that a lifetime of assumptions and prejudice I’d held about RVs and motorhomes began to crumble and fall away.

That visit was thus a seminal event, a turning point that lead us down the path we’re now following.