Goodbye, Old Friend

Several hundred of us gathered to celebrate the life of Punky Morton today. He was my high school classmate and closest friend in my teen years. A dozen or so high school classmates were among the hundreds who attended the service in the community college meeting room that had been a basement room of a textile plant in Wadesboro. Three speakers extolled Punky's creative genius, his musical talent, his entrepreneurial skills, his generosity, his sense of adventure and his ability to make friends and be a friend. After a life that at times seemed to be on stimulants, allowing him to accomplish more things in a shorter time than anyone I've ever known, Punky succumbed on Christmas Eve to a malignant brain tumor.

After the service was over, several of my classmates and I gathered around to talk about our class, our lives and our loss. Punky had helped put together all of the reunions we'd had over the years. And we talked about something that he and I had talked about when I saw him two months ago in a final visit: the regret we feel for having allowed good friendships to go dormant, nearly forgotten as we scattered from the places where we had grown up. Like most members of my high school class, I left the comfortable confines of that little community as quickly as I could. I made new friends in new places. I built a new life with a new family — a wife who had not been part of my teen years, and children. I put aside thoughts of people I knew I might never see again.

But when Punky was diagnosed with brain cancer, his old friends passed the word, and scores of people contacted him, encouraged him and reminisced with him. I was one of them. It made him think of all that he had lost by not retaining those friendships, not picking up the phone to call an old friend, not keeping current addresses and phone numbers, not stopping to visit at every opportunity. Those friendships are part of life, and when you lose them, you lose a part of your life. I will always regret not keeping my best friend from high school a continuing part of my life's later big moments.

As we grieved for Punky, we also thanked him for bringing us together again, even if it is in mourning, and we vowed to have reunions more frequently and to keep alive the ties that had bound us so many years ago. Punky taught us many things, most recently that life is short.