Matt

I met up with a friend of mine after the running class in Okemos. Matt and I have been friends for almost 30 years, when he moved across the street from me in fourth grade. Matt was in my wedding and one of only a couple of guys I've stayed in touch with from high school. We grew up with our Dad's on the ski patrol together, so we would spend weekends together in the winter skiing and the we'd do a fair amount of biking together, riding DALMAC (bike ride from Lansing to Mackinac) a few times. We got into a fair amount of trouble together growing up and even though we traveled in different circles in high school and college, we stayed friends. Our Dad's still hang out together even in their old age.

We sat around over beers for a couple hours catching up on each others families, kids and mutual friends from high school. We did a lot of laughing and started a lot of the conversations with, "Remember when we...." followed by something we did that we should have probably been arrested, punished or injured doing. When Matt and I were 19, we road tripped with our friend Rodney to Arizona, Tijuana and then to Los Angeles to see Matt's brother Teod (formerly known as Todd). Out of a lot of trips in my life, I have some of the most vivid memories of this one. We sat around reliving the whole road trip and the number of dumb things we did that we couldn't believe we made it through, including a visit to Tijuana we should never of survived.

It was really cool to reflect on all of the shared experiences he and I have over 29 years, and even as we've gotten older, live in different cities and gotten smarter, how well we still really know each other. At one point Matt and I were talking about our kids, and started laughing, thinking about how our parents probably had the same conversations about the stuff we were doing at their age. In the same way our Dad's are still friends at almost 70 years old, I can easily imagine sitting at a bar with Matt at age 70 and re-telling the story of how he almost died on the side of a mountain in Los Angeles.