I was working at home Thursday afternoon when the postman rang. I opened the door and had to sign for a small box he was holding. While surprised to see him I knew what was inside. I signed and printed my name, accepted the box, and took it back to my office. Instead of opening it immediately I put it on my desk and resumed writing.
I didn’t last long before I stopped. It wasn’t curiosity that made me open the box. It was my pal, calling from inside, wanting to come out.
I own two watches from the deceased now, one is my father’s engraved retirement watch that stopped running even before he did. In this box was my second, a gift from him via his fiancee. My buddy died over a year ago and she had been meaning to send it nearly as long. But when all that’s left are souvenirs of love, parting with an emotional one is difficult.
I called my buddy Huevos (“egg” in Spanish), a moniker I bestowed upon him one day when we were playing golf ahd he hit a ball into a sand trap that splashed with a wide, sandy lie. Sitting there the ball looked like a fried egg. He called it a that, a fried egg. I called him Huevos from that point forward.
Huevos and I met as middle-aged coworkers and defied the odds. We became very close friends and it didn’t take long. We knew each other for three decades before he died and never once did we share a cross word. Ours was a friendship built on relaxed trust and ten million laughs.
Way back at the beginning he argued all the time with his second wife. He’d run around on the first, a good woman he came to regret losing when traded for the second. He bit the apple: good sex, bad idea. When the good sex turns to bad sex, the bad idea becomes a dumb idea. Those two were destined to split; the signs were obvious.
Paired alone as a golfing twosome the fried egg day, we spent half that round discussing worry. He never worried, his wife always did, and because of that they fought all the time.
I was curious about how that could come about, lovers becoming fighters. After golf that day I decided drving home to become a worry expert. Little of cogent, coordinated substance was written about it back then, so I started piecing together bits and pieces of insight.
Over the next twenty years I’d interview 4,000 people around the world about what he or she worried about and learned a lot. More importantly I learned how to effectively teach a vital life skill that helps people manage it more effectively.
A few years after egg day my pal hit the greatest golf shot I’ve ever seen; I described it in the foreword of my book Managing the Worry Circle.
We had finished a round at the original TPC Sawgrass layout and stopped the golf cart atop the clubhouse hill. Huevos spied a bull gator sunning itself way down on the bank of a pond ninety yards away. He dropped a golf ball, took out a wedge, hit a high, soaring shot, and conked that gator right square between the eyes. The ball rebounded twenty feet high. The gator woke up angrier than his ex-wife.
The gator came after us with speed, determination, and a superb sense of direction. We watched as he raced up the hill and quickly realized it wasn’t planning to stop. Panicked, we jumped in the golf cart, Huevos floored the accelerator, and we lurched and raced away. Huevos was wheelman, laughing hysterically as we fled like cowards.
Huevos never expected to live as long as he did; he passed sixty after expecting to die in his forties. He had inherited polycystic kidney problems, a terminal disease that gradually forces the organs to stop working.
In the end each kidney swelled to the size of a football; together they weighed 52 pounds. Life was life no longer living, it was inhaling and exhaling with a tax to pay in between. The end was not what he deserved, just as is it isn’t fair for many good people who wear a watch that needs a good home sooner than it should.
I already have a nice watch I wear every day and plan to keep wearing it. But now I have a special one for special occassions whenever the time comes to take my along. I miss him very much and trust he’s avoiding heaven’s sand traps. I hope he’s one-putting every green.
But if the gator’s up there too, I’ll bet he’s still chasing Huevos cloud to cloud.