When I first heard of the death of my friend Rodney Wood I was not instantly overcome with grief. After all, I had not seen him since 1985. As the day went by, I found myself short tempered and angry, and in the evening, I figured out that it was because of the news I had received.

Ron and I became friends in the sixth grade. We found that we had similar interests such as music, hunting, fishing, and just being in the woods. We used to skip school on April 1, each year, to go trout fishing because it was the first day of the season. We would also make special plans for duck hunting, deer hunting, and what ever else came up.

A couple of times, we camped along Otter Creek, near Brantingham NY, for a week each time. We would spend the week fishing and exploring the woods. We always used to make plans to go on a backpacking trip back into the West Canada Lakes, or some other wilderness area, but we never did it. Willie Nelson said it in a song: "Ain’t it funny how time slips away."

I remember this one time that we each had girlfriends and we were hanging out one day. Ron said that they should never take him into the woods because he would become a wild man. He was telling this in a way that meant to her, when she read between the lines, that he would become passionate. But he insisted that he would go wild if they went into the woods and it might be dangerous. The suspense built over what would happen, and finally we all went for a walk, and ended up in the woods. After a few minutes he started climbing trees, and they couldn’t get him to come down. It was one of the funniest things I ever saw.

There were times when I was not in town, and there was a big snowstorm. Ron knew that I was gone and my mother was home alone. He would walk all the way from his house on High Street, to my house on Barringer Road and shovel the driveway for her. He just did this because that was what friendship meant to him.

Later on, after I graduated, we were looking for jobs and went to work at the Chicago Pneumatic tool company. We were both hired the same day, and after the big layoff in 1974 I ended up in the Air Force because there was absolutely no work in the Valley. He used to tell me that getting out [of the Valley and into the Air Force] was the best thing I could have done.

We drifted apart over the years, mostly because my trips home were few and far between. I would stop by his house looking for him from time to time, but really had no contact since 1985.

The news of his death was a shock, and worse was to find out that he had died from lung cancer. I never knew he was sick. Of course there is nothing I could do about it, but I guess I feel strange because I wasn’t there when he might have needed a friend.

I will always think of him as being just around the next bend in the river, fly rod in hand, waiting for me to catch up so he could show me the trout he just caught.