My Friend and My Regrets.

When I moved to Wyoming, I kind of came here with faith and a prayer. With a combination of some answered prayers, spiritual guidance, and a heck of a job offer, I packed my bags and moved blindly to Sheridan, Wyoming. I had never been there in my life. I was worried as I traveled through that rough Hell they call southern Wyoming, that I was possibly making the biggest mistake of my life, but as I traveled northward and began getting into the Northern Heaven of Wyoming, I realized just how lucky I had become. I came to work for a man named John Dolinar. A man of whom I had only talked to on the phone, but a man who either was a very generous man, or a dang good con-artist. I worked for John for around two months before I met him in person. We met at a CPR training. His presence was something unexplainable. He was a very large man. I noticed him immediately as I climbed out of my work truck. He looked like some mob boss out of a movie. He stood there smoking a Camel. As I approached him he gave me a little smile stuck out his hand and I shook it. I said " I guess your my boss huh" and he said yep. John kept a closed circle, and earning his respect and trust was a pretty big accomplishment. Through the two years that I worked for him, I spent at least half of that time earning his trust and respect. As time went on John and I started doing a lot of work together. and while working we became very good friends. There were days that we would spend the last two hours of the day just talking about life. Some days he would just call my office and we would just talk. Nothing ever specific just life in general. John and I had two separate systems of beliefs, but I learned a lot about life in general from him. John was a smart man. John went from being the guy that didn't have a pot to pee in, to being the guy that handed out the pots to pee in. He was happy to bring others along with him. As I became closer to him, I became close to his family, and they became my family away from my family. About a year ago a couple of opportunities arose for me to make a career change. Even though I wasn't looking for a change, I prayed about what to do and felt a strong feeling to make the move. One of the hardest days of my life was telling my friend John that I was leaving the company. It was hard for me and hard for my wife, she had grown to love John too. That day as I climbed into my SUV to make the 1.5 hour drive to Gillette, my wife just stood there with tears in her eyes. I knew what I had to do, and I knew what God wanted me to do. So I went and did it. I felt horrible that day as I walked into John's suite. I knocked on the door, he opened the door and said: "Well Dave, what are you doing here, do you want to go and grab some dinner". I looked down at the floor and said that I wasn't hungry and that I needed to talk to him. I told him of my decision, he tried to bribe me out of my decision, and understandably accepted my resignation. About a couple of months later he was diagnosed with lung and liver cancer. We met up about a month after that at a Wyoming Engineering Society's meeting and we sat down at the bar. He had quit drinking and I didn't drink so we drank diet Cokes and talked about his sickness. He had quit smoking that week, but it was a little too late. That night at the formal banquet, my wife and I sat down and ate dinner with he and his family, we still felt like a part of his family even after we left it. Time passed. I made a couple of phone calls, wrote a few emails, and last week I made the attempt to visit him. He was gone. Now here I am.
I titled my blog, "My Friend and My Regrets" because I have regrets. I have a lot of them. I don't have regrets for John, because he was a good man. I know God loved him and I understand that he has been taken back to that God who gave him life. I have regrets for the kind of friend that I was. There were so many times that I thought that I should go and visit, and so many times that I thought that I should call, but I blew them off because I was so focused on other things. I never changed the way I felt about my friend, I just got so busy with my other agendas that I put him on the back burner. I don't know why I am like that. I don't have a lot of regrets, but the way I have tossed old friends on the back burner is a regret that I will have to live with the rest of my life. I can look back on my life and see a lot of friends that really meant a lot to me that, as our lives took different courses, I tossed on the back burner until I eventually had nothing to do with them. Not that I didn't think the world of them, but I was so focused on the course that I was taking, that I didn't take the time to keep in touch, or just let them know that I still thought they were great and that they still meant a lot to me. And for that I have a hollow regret. I wish I would have not done that with my friend John, because now it's too late. I guess I have never been good at walking and chewing gum at the same time. I think that I probably should start to learn.