An Old Friend Named Lynn

It is amazing how you can meet up with an old friend, one from decades ago, and you pick up like you last saw each other yesterday. This happened to me Friday, September 23, 2022. 

We were good friends in high school. Lynn Watts, Charlie Turner, and I ran together, coon hunted, chewed tobacco, drank beer, and shot cars. The memories are deep, wide, plentiful, colorful, hilarious, sinful. We graduated high school in 1974. Things change after that; they always do. I married within three years, and Lynn moved away. First, I think they were in the Tupelo area, then somewhere near Jackson. I did see him some. He, along with his brother, Jackie, stopped by our house on West Monroe Avenue a few times before our first child was born in 1980. That's how I know the last time I saw him was around 1979. Then he quit coming by.

Charlie saw him a time or two after that. But Lynn drifted away and neither one of us knew where he was. Often I thought of him. Being very fond of Lynn, I wondered how he was, where he was, what he was up to. Periodically, I would ask Charlie if he had heard from Lynn, and the answer was always no until it wasn't. Somewhere along the way, the answer became, "I think he's dead." Charlie heard that Lynn was under a truck working on it and the truck fell on him and killed him.

Although this made me sad, I never completely gave up on the idea of seeing my old friend again. I searched Facebook and came up with about 75 Lynn Watts. I checked out each profile and was able to eliminate all but one of them. The one I could not eliminate had only one Facebook friend and one post. What does that tell you? Right, this is somebody who rarely gets on the social media site. 

This Lynn's one post was something about the Mississippi State Flag. The About information contained nothing. From the flag post, I concluded that he might be from Mississippi. There was a birthdate which was about the right year. So, I had the possibility of someone named Lynn Watts who might be from Mississippi and who was about the right age. It was a possibility. Oh, the profile picture, a bass boat. That could be Lynn. He was always an outdoorsman.

To make a short story long, I sent this Lynn a friend request. It was a long time, six months, or was it a year? before he responded. I opened Facebook not long ago to see a notification that Lynn Watts had accepted my Friend Request. Not only that, but he had commented on a post of mine, one that showed Penny and me at an MDCC football game. He asked, "What happened to that red hair and that red beard?"

I never had red hair, but my beard was red once. This was after high school and before it turned blond so very few people would remember this: maybe three, Lynn Watts being one of them. "Are you the Lynn Watts I went to high school with?" I asked in response. 

His answer was, "e9t, CT and his coon hounds. Class of 74."

My mouth flew open, my heart rate increased, and I knew Lynn Watts, the one I went to school with, was alive. Nobody but Charlie Turner, Lynn Watts, and Zane Hodge knew about e9t. That's a long story that I won't tell here, but it was all the proof I needed.

Gosh amighty. He looks almost exactly the same.

We chatted a little and made tentative plans to get together the next time Penny and I were in the Jackson area. That wasn't long, only a week later, when Penny took a Friday off work and we went south. We made plans to meet Lynn at Berry's in Florence, Mississippi. This was September 23 at about 5:00 p.m. We drove up and parked beside his Toyota pickup. He climbed out, and I said, "You look pretty good for a dead man."

There are no words to describe how happy I was to see him. Those old friendships don't die. Inside and at our table, we talked about the old days, of course. Those forty-three years since we last saw each other collapsed into nothing, they did not even exist anymore.

It's really him. He's not dead; he's alive.

We talked and talked. He talked and talked. Our server never asked us to leave, but she was giving us the eye. I don't know how long we were in there, but it was a long time. We could have stayed all night. Finally, I just grabbed the ticket, got up, and headed for the register. I didn't want to leave, but we needed to get home. 

I can't stop looking at this photo. Lynn, my
old friend. He's alive.

I don't know when we will get together again, but we will. When I am off work, I will probably make a trip down and Charlie Turner and I will get up with him. I think we are old enough now and Christian enough now to stay out of jail. We were some terrible trio back in the day.