Miss You Like Crazy

My sweet friend Bob is celebrating his first Sunday in heaven today. I am so jealous of him. After a long and adventurous life, Bob just met Jesus peacefully in his sleep this past Wednesday.

I met Bob when I was working at the Madison Herald. We were both freelance writers. We loved talking about what we would be writing about the next week. For him, it was effortless. For me, not so much.

Bob was an accomplished journalist. He had worked for quite a few newspapers around Mississippi as both a reporter and photographer. I discovered that he had quite the love for his Mississippi State bulldogs which came with serving as the director of pr at MSU for 20 years.

We could talk and talk and talk. But mostly I loved to listen. He served in the Navy during WWII and was stationed in the Philipines. He didn't talk about that a lot. He would rather tell me about growing up in small town Mississippi. Oh, goodness, I would laugh until I couldn't breathe listening to his stories.

On my nightstand is the autographed copy of his book, "Kudzu, Homebrew and Dinner on the Ground," that Bob sent me last spring as a surprise. We had been talking and I had cried because something he told me made me cry.

Bob's diagnosis with cancer hit all of us as his friends more than him it seemed. He faced it the way he faced everything else he had in his 82 years of life. With laughter and determination and grit. He found it all so amusing that he even wrote a book about it called, "Hot Flashes, Swollen Ankles and Sore Breasts - And I'm a Man".

Today we will all gather for the visitation service and tomorrow will be his funeral. I have a feeling there will be a lot of story telling going today. Bob wouldn't have it any other way.

Good bye my sweet friend. I miss you like crazy.