Exeunt omnes
Two years ago I aligned myself with a General Contractor named David Hyde. Over the route of two years, David and I did some wonderful paintings collectively. We made a tremendous team and our clients loved us. I drew fantastical snap shots and he grew to become them into real locations. I can dream up incredible designs all day long, however they best be counted if someone buys them and someone else builds them. For the last years the a person else who constructed them become David Hyde. David was a expert, conscientious contractor and he changed into additionally my friend.
In a phone call that seems never to have really happened, I found out on Wednesday morning that my friend David Hyde had died a couple of hours earlier. That news is still pounding with a dull throb inside of my skull, almost as if I'd been punched in the head.
David became a yr older than I am. Who thinks that a 44-year-antique man is going to die abruptly and without a warning? I spoke with him hours earlier than he died and we mentioned the paintings we had planned for the next couple of months. We laid plans in blissful lack of knowledge that Damocles' sword become placing over his head. I loved that man like a brother and now he's long gone. My private sympathies exit to his wife and their daughter. Their loss towers over mine and I cannot believe what it need to be like to lose a husband and father. It's a atypical and overwhelming component to run headlong into that Ultimate Reality like this.
Suddenly, ensuring Mrs. Parker remains happy and that we get the Nicklaus lights completed through subsequent week doesn't quite seem so crucial because it did more than one days ago. Shocking though it's far, having the Grim Reaper brush past me has had me putting things into attitude with a renewed rigor. In quite a few ways though, I'd have desired to preserve David around and my priorities skewed. But I guess that alternative's now not on the desk.
David was everything I'm not. By that I mean he was a suburban, mega-church attending, evangelical with a Jesus fish on his business card. I read the New York Times every day and give money to the ACLU. Forging a working relationship required that each of us put aside the rhetoric we heard from the talking heads on our respective sides of the supposed culture war that's going on in our country. With our ideological differences acknowledged and set aside, we could concentrate on what we had in common. What a concept! That we set aside that crap and saw one another as individuals rather than as our demographic profiles was an opportunity for me, and for him, to let go of the identity politics that is such an easy trap to fall into. Blue states and red states don't really exist you know, and political polarization is an all too effective tool used to win elections. However, it's a lousy way to live your life and shameful way to choose whom to trust. You can only believe that a dreaded Other is your enemy when you can't see his face. I believe that and I know it from first hand experience. I didn't think like that two years ago but I sure do now. So I got to become a better man while at the same time working on a better portfolio. Amazing.
I'm going to move ahead, albeit slowly. Everybody will, it is what occurs after any person dies. But a part of me goes to live right here for a while. So good-bye David my buddy, and thank you. I'll take it from here.