One Birthday... One Long Overdue Reunion

It's kind of hard for me to believe I'm old enough to have gone 20 years without seeing my best friend from grade school. But that's the sad reality...

After my parents divorced, I changed schools to Sacajawea Elementary and started claiming my grandparents' address as my home. Reid lived a couple houses up the street from theirs and I spent most of the time I wasn't in school hanging out with him. We spent countless hours mastering the Atari 2600. We rode our bikes down to the Bookworm to buy comic books, up to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee or Big Gulp, and over of Leslie Groves Park to fish for trout in the Columbia River. We rocked out to OK95 and on special days we made it out to the Wild 'N Wet water park or Chuck E. Cheese.
Unfortunately, somewhere around the time we graduated from Sacajawea my parents moved to Kennewick. Reid and I still attended the same schools but there was less time for us to do things after school and since I was old enough to take care of myself I no longer spent most of my summer vacation at my grandparents' house. Reid was still my best friend and the only friend who came to visit me at our Kennewick house.

Reid moved to Lacrosse, Wisconsin at the end of our sophomore year. We wrote each other letters throughout the remainder of high school and he made it back to the Tri-Cities for a few weeks during the summers. But after graduation I went directly off to work in Tacoma and I lost track of my best friend. I barely came home to Richland before I found myself a freshman at the UW. I finally regained some composure about a year later but by then I didn't know how to contact Reid. In hindsight I should have just sent another letter to his parents house but I guess I figured that, like me, he had left home and wouldn't be there to receive it.

A couple years ago I received an email. It was a little vague but I was pretty sure that my old friend Reid had found me again. We've been exchanging emails ever since—catching up on all the years we missed. Then, a few weeks ago, Reid invited me to join he and his family at Camp Lookout State Park where they would be spending the 4th of July holiday.

I arrived in the early afternoon and saw my friend for the first time in almost 20 years. He, his sons Hunter and Chase, his girlfriend Shannon, and Scott (another old friend from school) were all down on the beach enjoying the first "warm" day of the week swimming in the ocean surf. They welcomed me into their camp, making sure I was well fed and "hydrated". The boys gave my shoulder a good workout with the Frisbee and Scott keep us entertained with his guitar while we sat around the camp fire.

Thank you, Reid. Because of you my 37th birthday was one of the best birthdays I've ever had. I will never forget it, just like I never forgot you during all those lost years.