If one thing hadn’t changed, it was his sense of unease. Years before he had seen a wall-hanging in Carol’s parent’s home, with the words: Goede Tijden Duren Nooit embroidered in Dutch. He had asked her what it meant in English. Her reply of: Good Times Don’t Last still stung.                          These were hardly his best times, and it seemed every bit as if the promise of anything better had passed him by. It was the past that would not let him be. It followed him every waking hour into an obsession of what might have been if only he had been a little bolder and had not made that promise to her father. But then it had been the price he paid to be with

I remember one Sunday morning quite vividly. I was eight or so. We were Catholic, but because of the mutual respect each side of the religious divide had for the other, we would sometimes attend the Bate’s Mennonite church in Chino, and they ours. This usually involved baptisms, confirmations, marriages or funerals. They had a visiting preacher this particular day who told the story of David and Jonathon, how they were friends and all, pledging their loyalty to each other, come what may. It sounded much like my two great-grandfathers, and I began to wonder just how people became friends anyway. Was it by chance that this happened? Was there something placed in the human soul that made this possible? I wanted to think so.