Almost a year...

As a kid, I remember being irritated by clichés. A large part of my life was spent with my Grandparents, so I was subjected to a litany of them. My least favorite was "time flies."

As a kid, time never flies. Ever.

Even after I got out of school, time seemed to crawl. I wandered aimlessly through my twenties, wondering if I would ever see evidence of time "flying." Working in the electronics department at Wal Mart, time most certainly does not fly. Moving from town to town in radio was hard, but still, a year seemed like two.

My thirties, however, were a different story. Weekends started to feel like one day instead of two. Time spent with my daughter was fleeting and before I knew it, I was forty.

In 2004, I started blogging and came to know a fella named Gene Maudlin, alias Old Horsetail Snake. At first our relationship consisted only of blog comments. Then one night, as I struggled through a divorce, he reached out with a phone call and we talked for a couple of very reassuring hours.

Gene was a good man. Unfortunately, he was also in his later years, and had been a smoker most of his life. For him, time definitely flew.

I went to his blog one day and found an announcement that he had passed away. He's been gone now for almost a year... yet I can still pull up his blog. I read several entries from it tonight. For those of us who only knew Gene via the online world, he will never die. In this realm, time stands still.

Weird thing, the Internet. Every modification of every website... every single click of a key... is a snapshot in time. A placekeeper to remind us what was happening in that tiny sliver of a moment.

Good night, Gene. Your blog buddy misses you. Thanks for making it possible, via your blog, for us to still visit now and then...