Crazy Dreams

Today Chris and I decided to step out of the rat race for a few hours, slow the pace, and spend the day celebrating our dear friend, Larry. He would have been 60 today. This photo of him was taken by a friend, and although my rendering of it certainly is no work of art, this candid snapshot says so much about Larry.

Carrie Underwood's "Crazy Dreams" describes perfectly just what Larry was about, so I'll thank her for many of the words here. Larry was a dark horse runner, a long shot. He was a hairbrush singer and a dashboard drummer.

If anyone ever had crazy dreams, it was Larry. Had he been handed another life, I believe he would have blissfully whiled away his days much like Caractacus Potts, the eccentric inventor of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and been happier than any of us could ever have imagined.

He was whimsical and aggravating, sometimes a free soul, sometimes stubborn and bullheaded. He was gentle and caring, and spent a lot of time making sure you didn't know it. He could be crass, yet always knew when to be a gentleman. He was smart. Boy, was he smart. He was a mess when it came to his room, but impeccably neat when he left for work every day. He loved life, he loved his friends, he loved his family, he loved his beer and he loved his cigarettes.

And we loved him.

At the end, he stood at the bottom of some crazy walls and probably thought, "I can't climb." Perhaps he felt a bit like Cinderella at the ball, running out of time. Larry knew how it felt to be afraid, knowing that it's all gonna slip away.

And yet, even in those last days, somewhere, somehow he found an inner strength, a positive outlook, a way to continue reaching out to all of us, his "China family," his close circle of friends who lived and worked and sweat and laughed and ate and drank and played and sang and invented and solved and cried and swore and shared good times and hard times with him for nine long years. Perhaps we were a kind of life-line for him, just as he was for us in so many ways through the years.

Carrie's words will always echo in my heart when I think of Larry. I imagine he's somewhere singing these words to us all, just waiting for someone to tell him to put a sock in it!

Here's to you free souls, you firefly chasers,
Tree climbers, porch swingers, air-guitar players.
Here's to you fearless dancers, shaking walls in your bedrooms,

There's a lot of wonder left inside of me and you.
Never let a bad day be enough to go and talk you into giving up
Sometimes everybody feels like you, just like you.

Thank God, even crazy dreams come true.

-- Carrie Underwood