Saturday, October 20, 2007

Farewell to a Friend

A friend of mine is moving away (No, this isn't a "somebody died" post. Just wanted to make that clear to begin with). I met Mike on the soccer field (where he's an excellent player), but our friendship really began around running. Though road running is an individual sport, there's something to having friends there, and Mike's was the only familiar face I saw when I ran at Wapak's "Run to the Moon" a year ago. From then on, I would see Mike at every race. It didn't hurt matters that we were very evenly matched, so we'd generally run together (you can click on my "running" label to find more detail of our races).

Then I'd see Mike at the library, and our kids would visit, but the funniest thing was that Andrew just absolutely loves Mike! He would run to Mike, smiling a huge smile, then crawl into Mike's arms and cuddle away, smiling all the while. That was important to Mike - I don't think we knew how important.

Anyway, Mike got a new job in Louisville, so he and his family are moving there. But yesterday as we drove by, we saw the moving van in front of their house so we stopped in to say goodbye. While we were there, Mike said something that caught my attention.

This is what he misses most about living in Africa (he's from Cameroon) - he misses that people will just drop in and will then sit around and visit with one another. Here, he finds, people are just too busy, and they're always on the go. There's just no time to sit and talk. That's not efficient use of time.

Even in rural towns like New Knoxville and New Bremen, people are just too busy to stop and talk. And that's sad.

1 comment:

Thoughts From Jeff said...

We need the art of presence