Another Lost Contact Bit The Dust

It happened a couple of years ago but I didn't know until today. One of my very favorite people from my Miami, round 3, days died of some sudden thing, like his heart stopped or one of those issues. That surprised me.

I don't feel guilty, exactly, about loss of contact, but I do regret the turns in my life that caused it. he wasn't in contact either. I'm the one who moved away on a semi-ill fated saga so I guess that puts it on me. We went through some times.

Once, when he'd gone back drinking his girlfriend called me to try to reel him in. It seems he was in the parking lot of one of those edge of Coconut grove little markets, standing off a couple of punks with a stick, and too drunk to have prevailed. Sober they'd have been toast. Then again, sober he wouldn't have been in the fray.

Details are a little vague but I recall getting him to get in the car as we peeled out being chased and cursed. Don't know if it stuck for good but he didn't drink for years after that, and married the girlfriend. She was quite a beauty.

This was not your average guy on the street, getting into fights. He had a masters degree in something and had at one time been very successful in advertising and fund raising in NYC. He was in vietnam in the Marines. Not sure if he was some sort of junior officer, but he also was a TI of some kind before he got out. He wasn't in all that long. Long enough, and no fan of that police action.

Terry wasn't what you expect a Marine to look like, if there is such a thing. Quite good humored and over the top intelligent. I wonder what family he had left. It is thought that his wife also died not long after, but circumstances of that are unknown. So young. She was younger than him by five years or more. I hope he was happy when he left. I know he had some good years.

So weird when people I think have it so much more together than I do either die or prove to be ready to explode. The friend who told me the news thinks his job is about to be cut any day now. He's not sure of alternatives. His would be more mainstream than mine, but that doesn't necessarily mean easier to achieve.

It's worth keeping up with the ones I saw as truer than other friends or acquaintances. I would say worth distancing from the riffraff, but I can't say I have any riffraff in my life at the moment. Maybe just me.

I'm hoping the part about his wife is wrong.

For some reason everything lately keeps bringing back to various times and people of the past. I don't know why. Usually I have little tolerance for the past. It's done. And you can't do any of it over, except by repeating the same mistakes. Maybe that is the lesson in all this, but for the life of me I don't know how to see it when I do certain mistakes over again.