Tag Archives: Friends

Bacon and Eggs and a Side of Serendipity

by Woody

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here) and orderable at all bookshops.

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Breakfast out already had been perfectly wonderful, delicious food enhanced by savory conversation with a dear friend, and then Serendipity pulled up a chair and the morning wonderfully became even more perfect.

St. Nick, as I nicknamed my pal because his heart is as big and giving as Santa Claus’s, was telling me about a “god wink” he recently experienced, that being what he calls serendipity, when the check arrived. Quick as a human wink, he snatched it and refused to split it, so in altruist defeat I slipped away to the washroom.

Upon returning to the table I was greeted by matching Cheshire grins from St. Nick and our waitress, Autumn, suggesting my fly was down. Fortunately, it was up.

What else was up that had them so delighted? Autumn’s well-used black folder for holding customer orders had caught St. Nick’s attention. Specifically, he eyed a strip of masking tape on the front cover. Torn off raggedly at both ends, the tape was not there to repair a crack. Rather, it bore a name, hand-printed legibly but hurriedly, in black marker. Not Autumn’s name, nor that of a co-worker she might have borrowed it from, but the name “John Wooden.”

St. Nick naturally asked about it; Autumn answered she writes Wooden’s name on her folder before each shift to remind her of his life lessons, no matter that she was born long after he retired from coaching basketball in 1975; and St. Nick then told her, in my continued absence, that I had been blessed to know Coach for more than two decades and even wrote a memoir about my friendship with him.

Autumn and me and Coach Wooden’s Wisdom

This name tag god wink was followed by another and a third, like blinking dry eyes in need of Visine. Firstly, I had considered asking St. Nick to brave the freeway traffic and meet me all the way in Tarzana at Vip’s Café because that was Coach Wooden’s regular breakfast spot. With luck we might even get Table 2, a booth actually, that was always reserved for Wooden and is now memorialized with a plaque.

Vip’s would have been especially meaningful on this occasion on account of the birthday gift I had on hand for St. Nick: a small card featuring Coach Wooden’s “Two Sets of Threes” – Never lie. Never cheat. Never steal. Don’t whine. Don’t complain. Don’t make excuses. – displayed inside a thick acrylic block.

The small keepsake elicited unexpectedly big emotions from St. Nick, who shared with me now that when his grown daughter was young she put the “Two Sets of Threes” on the refrigerator where it remained for a very long time. To this day, daughter and father still recite all six.

With Coach Wooden’s spirit having joined us at our table across from Serendipity, and imagining what he would do in this god-winking situation, I asked St. Nick if he would mind if we gave the “Two Sets of Three” to Autumn now and I would give him a replacement later.

St. Nick not only generously concurred, he did so with great Enthusiasm which fittingly is a cornerstone trait on Coach Wooden’s famous “Pyramid of Success.” The impromptu re-gift certainly proved a success. Oh, I wish you could have seen Autumn’s face light up as bright as the springtime sun on this cloudless UCLA Bruin Blue-skied day!

Outside the café afterwards, St. Nick recalled one of his favorite Wooden-isms: “You can’t live a perfect day without doing something nice for someone else who can never repay you.”

It was indeed a perfect start to a masterpiece day.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Friendships Reign in the Rain

by Woody

The harder the recent rains fell, the greater became the flood of phone calls and voicemails and text messages from friends, far and farther, asking how I was doing on account of our coastal paradise making the national news.

I bet you had friends do likewise—or maybe you were one.

The atmospheric river may have been Man Bites Dog worthy news, but friends checking in on friends is as common as Dog Wags Tail. And yet such acts of friendship, and family-ship too, are worth acknowledging—no, worth celebrating!—and not taking for granted.

A week ago in this space I chronicled how a Good Samaritan took 20 minutes out of her day, and drove quite a few miles out of her way, to personally deliver a package that had mistakenly landed in her mailbox.

If a kind stranger will go to such lengths, one can only imagine the distances our friends and loved ones will travel. I didn’t have to imagine the other day when, as the deluge hit full force, I received the following text from a relatively new friend, but already a dear one for some friendships are as fast and hearty as instant oatmeal, who lives in Northern California:

“Hey Pal, just checkin’ in to see if you’re ok. I’m just hearing and reading horrific stuff, and they start talking about Montecito, SB, and Ventura. I think the worst is over for us up here, but if there’s anything I can do, it’s only a four-hour drive. There’s nothing on my plate that can’t be postponed. Let me know. Stay dry, my friend – dj”

Only a four-hour drive! That, in a nutshell, is friendship, where distance and time are no obstacles. As Abdu’l-Bahá eloquently put it: “Where there is love, nothing is too much trouble, and there is always time.”

This quote often makes me think of my friend Scott and his now-grown son, Justin. A ballpark figure for how many youth baseball games Justin played in is 1,500, but father and son can both tell you the exact the number Scott missed: three—two of them because of emergency surgery.

Another sporting example of love being blind to trouble and always finding time is my longtime, and now long-distance, friend Randy who checked in on me from New York during the heavy rainstorm. In turn, I asked how his son Charlie’s tennis season at Merrimack College is going.

In a word, and befitting rising floodwaters, swimmingly! As a junior, Charlie is a team co-captain playing No. 1 doubles and No. 3 singles. And here’s the Abdu’l-Bahá-like best part of the update: Randy and his wife Debby, despite an eight-hour roundtrip drive to home matches, have attended 80 percent of them, plus most road contests too.

One final vignette of love and friendship, which are one and the same, ignoring distance. Not long ago, my college buddy Mikey was in Italy, in the coastal paradise of Sorrento, in a marketplace alleyway where he saw a man sitting with a typewriter. Knowing my affection for QWERTY machines, Mikey investigated, learned Paolo Grasso was a street poet for hire and requested one honoring my 20-year consecutive day running streak.

Titled “The Runner,” the custom creation is typed in Italian on one side, translated into English on the other, and is lovely. Even lovelier, however, is that Mikey thought of me some 6,000 miles away.

The poem includes this beautiful stanza: “This continuous running / towards a goal / makes the moment precious.”

Friends, shine or rain, make the moment precious as well.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Spice of Life is Tastiest Ingredient

by Woody

The key ingredient in any dish, from fancy cordon bleu to backyard barbecue, that makes taste buds dance the happiest and sing the loudest is not a mystery spice, rare herb, or secret sauce, but rather, simply, the company with whom you eat.

Indeed, enjoyed with the right person or gathering, a nothing-special hot dog surpasses a perfectly prepared meal in a restaurant gastronomique in Paris.

Which is why, although I am not a regular chowhound of hot dogs, one of my all-time favorite meals was a stadium frankfurter. Actually, about 25 of my favorite meals, that being the ballpark number of Ohio State football games I went to during my elementary days alongside my two older brothers and dad.

The sweetest condiment for a hot dog is the joy of special company.

Frankly speaking, in a blind taste test those ol’ Horseshoe Stadium hot dogs would probably have ranked dead last. Eating them blindfolded would have actually been a good idea because, unlike the Buckeyes’ scarlet-and-grey home jerseys, the wieners, plucked from pots of murky water that looked less potable than a swamp, were grey only.

Add in stale buns, depleted condiment stations, and a Sir Edmund Hillary-like climb back to our upper-deck seats, by which time the wieners were cold dogs, and you had prison-like grub…

…unless you were sandwiched between your two big brothers in the bleachers, in the spring of your life, in glorious Midwestern autumn, in which case it became the standard against which I still measure all hot dogs.

Another of my most memorable hot dogs also involves my oldest brother. It was in New York City, long ago, from a vendor cart. Strolling away, my brother took his first bite and – Splat! – the entire web of sauerkraut fell onto the sidewalk that was grosser than the witch’s brew-like hot dog water in Ohio Stadium.

Rather than turn on his heels and ask the vendor for a replacement bale of sauerkraut or, perish the thought, eat the hot dog naked – let me rephrase that; eat a naked hot dog – he invoked the five-second rule; scooped up the sauerkraut, now flavored with a sullied sundry of sidewalk spices; and gobbled it up with the gusto of Joey Chestnut in Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Ever since, every hot dog I’ve eaten always tastes a little better knowing it isn’t topped with sidewalk-seasoned sauerkraut.

Based on pedigree, it’s hard to top a Dodger Dog. Fittingly, one of my most savored hot dogs was in the Dodger Stadium press box dining room, during a seventh-inning stretch, when my writing idol Jim Murray joined me for a quick chew and chat.

All this thinking about hot dogs was stirred this Halloween when I had another fantastic frank that joined my grand slams of memorable meals. Just as candy tastes better when it’s earned by trick-or-treating on foot, it is similarly true for hot dogs I can now attest.

In addition to sweets for kids, for the past 30-plus years Scott, a friend of a friend, has given out hot-off-the-charcoal-grill chili dogs, complete with all the fixings – sans, thankfully, sidewalk sauerkraut – to adults. Youngsters are welcome to both treats, adding up to few hundred hot dogs served annually.

Scott’s enthusiasm and charisma, assisted by a fun giant wiener hat and aided further by free margaritas and full-size beers, make his hot dogs unforgettably delicious and worth the trip across town.

To be perfectly frank, these neighborhood-famous chili dogs, with the fellowship of my brother-of-a-friend Ken added in, were darn near the equal in my memory to those battleship-grey cold stadium hot dogs of long ago.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Friend Turns Floodwaters Into Sunshine

by Woody

What a difference a day makes.

More accurately, what a difference a friend can make on a day. Such it was on recent back-to-back afternoons that for me were as polar as sunshine and flooding rain, figuratively and almost literally.

Let me begin with the rainstorm. My Much Better Half and I are having our kitchen and downstairs guest bathroom remodeled. “Don’t expect smooth sailing,” we were forewarned. This proved a portentous metaphor because returning from my daily run I opened the front door and found myself in need of a boat.

While I was out, a worker clogged and broke the toilet – a toilet that was not to be used for it was covered by protective plastic during painting – and it runneth over continuously for an hour or more. Floodwaters overtook the entryway, dining room, family room, and most of our primary bedroom. The tide even surged into the kitchen and garage.

With hardwood floors ruined, carpet too, my spirits the following day were soggy as well. When I went on a run that afternoon, for a rare time during my running Streak of 7,341 consecutive days, I felt like cutting my intended miles shorter. But then…

“Hi, Woody!” came a voice from behind my left ear, so close and loud and unexpected that I flinched. Because I was wearing earbuds, the greeter’s volume was purposely turned up to be heard. However, because of a dead battery I was not listening to music. As a result, I may have yelped as if startled by the sight of a slithering rattlesnake two strides ahead.

Instead, it was a friendly face that I have seen from time to time at Kimball Park. Brody, a handsome young man with sharp features and a soft smile, grew up in Ventura and is a recent graduate from UC Santa Barbara, my alma mater, where he was in the ROTC. I learned all this, and more, on previous occasions he joined me for a few miles when our running paths crossed.

This go-round-and-round around the soccer fields he updated me about his enlistment as an officer in the Army (the Irish meaning of Brody is “protector,” perfectly fitting for someone safeguarding our country); that he is now married; and is stationed in Texas, which he said has been so Hades-hot lately that this 80-degree Ventura day felt chilly to him.

And just like that, like morning dew under August sunshine, my soggy mood over “The Great Woodburn Flood of ’23” quickly evaporated. My heavy feet that felt like I was slogging through a muddy boot-camp obstacle course suddenly had Hermes-like wings on their ankles and the next two miles breezed by. Brody’s pace was surely slower than he wanted, mine a tad too fast, for isn’t friendship sometimes a compromise?

The last time I had seen Brody was in a rainstorm, the showers so steady that the park’s fields then coincidentally resembled my downstairs floors only 24 hours earlier. On that rainy day we had laughed as we splish-splashed along; this day now, I suddenly felt winsome and recalled a poem titled “On Friendship” by John Wooden:

At times when I am feeling low, / I hear from a friend and then

My worries start to go away / And I am on the mend

No matter what the doctors say – /And their studies never end

The best cure of all, when spirits fall, / Is a kind word from a friend

Indeed, a kind word – better yet, a couple miles of friendly conversation – can turn rain into sunshine.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Part 2: Old Friends Are Time Machines

by Woody

“It takes a long time to grow an old friend,” John Wooden said, and a bookend “Wooden-ism” comes from his Seven-Point Creed: “Make friendship a fine art.”

On the latter, it pains me greatly to confess, I failed regarding the first friend I made in California after moving from Ohio at age 12. Jimmy Hart, just a few months my junior, was the cousin of my godsister, Karen, two years and one day older than me.

Karen’s family lived at Solimar Beach, and Jimmy and I basically spent my first summer in Ventura living there. Boogie boarding, exploring the tidal pools, playing basketball by day and eight ball pool by night, Jimmy and I enjoyed an idyllic summer.

Two old friends enjoying the magic of getting together.

Unfortunately, he lived in Pasadena so we did not see each other much during the ensuing school years.

Every summer, however, we would pick up where we left off at the beach house. Too, we occasionally had weekend sleepovers at one another’s house. We stayed up late watching a new show called “Saturday Night Live” and stayed up even later talking about girls.

Eventually, as happens, we went our separate ways for college and the ensuing roads of life. For a while we stayed in touch with each other’s ever-changing lives through Karen until insidious cancer stole her 26 years ago. Alas, without hers and the beach house’s gravitational pull, Jimmy and I drifted apart until we only caught up with Christmas cards.

This past holiday season, our cards, as usual, shared similar P.S. notes of good intentions: “It’s been too long. Let’s get together soon!”

And that was that until just before Valentine’s Day when I received a text from Jimmy telling me – not asking, telling – we were having lunch the following week. No more ifs, ands, buts or excuses. Pick a day; he would drive from San Gabriel.

Perhaps the best way to describe our reunion is that it was an hour before we stopped talking long enough to order our first beers and half as long again before we took a time out, upon the waitress’s umpteenth visit, to look at the menus.

Jimmy’s hair, once surfer long and Scandinavian blond, is long gone. His face, like mine, has laugh lines and lines caused by a youth spent in the sun at the beach. But what remains as unchanged as fingerprints are his radiant smile and a laugh that sounds like it is infused with champagne bubbles.

For a couple hours it was as if H.G. Wells’ time machine had turned 2023 into 1973. Naturally, we revisited the past, including when we saw John Wooden give a lecture in Pasadena, one of the last times we were together. Growing up, we both memorized Coach’s famous “Pyramid of Success” and always double-knotted our sneaker laces as he advised.

Reminiscing, enjoyable as it was, gave way to catching up on our lives today. We talked about our wives; our children, four for him and two for me, plus my two granddaughters; work, he was a middle school gym coach, now retired – “I always taught the kids about the Pyramid of Success,” he shared happily; and on and on.

Jimmy’s cheeseburger grew cold as did my tacos, and our second pints grew warm, because our mouths remained focused on more import matters. I wish you could have heard us.

If you have an old friend you have lost contact with, I urge you to make friendship a fine art by reaching out. For that matter, reach out to a newer friend and start growing an old friendship.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make

Growing an Old Friend Takes Time

by Woody

Coach John Wooden, during the two decades I was blessed to be his friend, told me many, many wise things – “Wooden-isms” I like to call them – including this gem: “It takes a long time to grow an old friend.”

I think of these words every time my wife is on the phone with Nanette, for they met a long time ago, all the way back in kindergarten, back in the Midwest, back in the early 1960s, and their friendship has been growing ever since. Despite thousands of miles between them literally, and even more miles figuratively along life’s roads of moves and college and marriage and families and more, they have remained dear friends.

I wish you could hear them on the phone together. I bet you have a similar rare friend. When they chat it is a time machine and they remain forever young, forever 5, or forever 11 when Lisa moved away from Northern Ohio to Southern California. Every few years, when phone calls simply won’t suffice, they meet up in various vacation cities for a girls’ weekend.

My daughter, Dallas, does Lisa and Nanette even better for a friendship starting age. She and Mikey planted the seed of an old friendship when they were 3 years young in daycare. They proceeded to go through school together, from kindergarten to senior year in high school, and did not lose touch after graduation. Indeed, a full three decades after they first took naps side by side on their sitter Jeanie’s living room floor, these two first-ever friends remain among each other’s best ones.

And yet the gold medal for a green thumb at growing an old friend, in my firsthand observation, is my 96-year-old dad who has a childhood friend of nearly that full life span. Although Lilly still lives in Urbana, Ohio, where they grew up together, they talk on the phone nearly weekly.

I, too, have tried to put Coach’s wisdom into practice. Although my family moved away from my birthplace of Columbus, Ohio to Ventura when I was 12, I have remained friends with an elementary school classmate who was also my tennis doubles partner. Jim Hendrix, a lefty with a wicked slice serve, was almost as magical with tennis strings as his famous namesake was with guitar strings and helped carry us to quite a few championship trophy victories. He eventually played at Ohio State where his father had once been the Buckeyes’ head coach.

An Irish proverb, and I have distant shamrock roots, says: “A good friend is like a four-leaf clover; hard to find and lucky to have.” Lucky for me on the first day of classes in seventh grade most of my teachers made their seating charts alphabetically. As a four-leaf-clover result, I found myself sitting next to Mark Wilson and Brian Whalen in quite a few classes.

I instantly had two new friends. We called ourselves “The Three W’s” and were as inseparable as the Three Musketeers all the way through high school. We were “That 70’s Show” 20 years before it aired, hanging out in Mark’s family room playing bumper pool and listening to music and watching “Fernwood 2 Night” and just being goofy teens.

But life, as it will, eventually took us on different paths, near and far. Slowly our contact faded mostly to Christmas cards. Lucky us, in the past decade we reconnected after all three W’s wound up physically close once more in Ventura County.

A brand-new reconnection with an old friend is where we will pick up in next week’s column.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make

Cold Day Warmed By Friendship

by Woody

“The coldest winter I ever spent,” Mark Twain is credited with quipping, “was a summer in San Francisco.”

The great writer apparently never spent an autumn day at a Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) game, in the old Municipal Stadium, with an arctic-like wind whipping in off Lake Erie. Nine innings at nine-below-zero is how I recall an abominable day when I was eight.

I have long forgotten whom the Tribe was even playing, but I remember rushing to the men’s room more frequently than an elderly man with a troubled prostrate – not to use the urinal, but because there were electric heaters on the ceiling.

It was my first time to a Major League Baseball game and since you can’t watch a home run from the men’s room, when the Indians came to bat I would trek back to my seat like Robert Peary braving the elements on the way to the North Pole.

By the bottom of fifth inning, I was rooting for the Indians to go down 1-2-3 so I could seek warm refuge again.

By the seventh-inning stretch-and-shiver, I had stuffed crumpled pages from the game program inside my sweatshirt for insulation like a homeless person using a newspaper as a blanket on a Twain-ian summer night in San Francisco.

“Hey, Mom,” I mumbled from blue lips when I got home. “Check out the souvenir I got.”

Mom, excitedly: “You caught a foul ball?”
Me, with teeth chattering: “N-n-n-no, I caught frostbite!”

In the half century since, I have never felt colder. And yet the other day, in our Pacific paradise, my mind flashed Erie-ily back to Cleveland’s “Mistake on the Lake” Stadium.

A friend and I had planned to get together at a local brewery. However, with coronavirus surging we decided – despite both of us being fully vaccinated and boosted – to instead meet up outdoors at a park.

Rain threatened our new picnic-table plan. Indeed, I got soaked and chilled to the bones on my daily run beforehand. Then the clouds suddenly parted and our happy hour was happily back on.

I thought I was bundled up sufficiently in my cozy “Ol’ Green” Patagonia wool pullover – that, coincidentally, my friend’s wife expertly darned a hole – over a long-sleeved shirt. Alas, as the Lake Erie-like coastal breeze began to pick up, and the temperature fell into the 40s, I began to shiver.

“You’re freezing,” my friend said. “We should go.”

“N-n-n-no, I’m fine,” I replied stubbornly, not wanting to cut our visit short. I was reminded of when my son was 5 or thereabouts. At his favorite buffet restaurant he always filled a bowl with a Matterhorn of vanilla soft-serve frozen yogurt and before even half-finishing his teeth would start chattering, his body shivered in the air conditioning, but he kept on devouring the treat.

That is how I felt now. I wanted to keep eating up our conversation even as my shivers persisted. As great a storyteller as my friend is, and supreme listener as well, here is an example of what makes him a friend of friends: with a summer-bright smile he offered me his winter coat …

… and when I politely declined he took it off nonetheless and wrapped me in it.

I am not exaggerating when I say it is The Warmest Coat that I have ever worn. Putting it on was like easing into a steamy bath. I think it must be stuffed with polar bear fur and penguin feathers and infused with the hot-chocolate breath of unicorns.

Warmer than any coat, of course, is a great friendship.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

 

Making Friendship A Fine Art

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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Making Friendship

A Fine Art

My friend Kurt phoned out of the blue the other morning for no other reason than to say “hi” and catch up. His timing was perfect as I was in need of a little pick-me-up. By the time he said “ciao” my socks were filled with helium.

After hanging up, my mind drifted to Coach John Wooden – whose birth date, coincidentally, is this coming Wednesday – and some lessons on friendship he taught me during the two decades I knew him.

The first time I joined Coach on his daily four-mile morning walk some 30 years ago, he gave me a laminated card featuring his father’s “Seven-Point Creed” that includes “Make friendship a fine art.”

In an effort to be such an artist, the next time I visited Coach I brought along a small gift. Knowing his love of poetry, I selected a hardback collection by Rumi. Shortly thereafter, I received a handwritten thank-you note and a copy of a poem authored by Coach titled On Friendship:

At times when I am feeling low, / I hear from a friend and then

My worries start to go away / And I am on the mend

No matter what the doctors say – / And their studies never end

The best cure of all, when spirits fall, / Is a kind word from a friend

More prized than the signed poem is that over the ensuing years Coach turned those stanzas into curing words, and deeds, when my spirits fell – particularly after my mom passed away and later when I was nearly killed by a drunk driver.

Coach also had a gift for raising my spirits when they were already high. For example, when I next visited him he recited a poem from the gift Rumi book. I must confess I did not know who he was quoting until he told me. Fittingly, the selection was titled “Love” which Coach insisted was the most important word in the English language.

The poem recital was a thoughtful gesture of rare grace and a lesson through example that saying “thank you” is nice, but to show thanks is far better. In other words, wear a new sweater or necklace the next time you see the person who gave it to you; put a gift vase on proud display before the giver visits; memorize a poem or line from a book given to you.

Another life lesson put into practice was how Coach always gave his full attention on the phone and never seemed in a hurry to hang up. Indeed, if he was too busy to talk he would simply not answer in the first place rather than risk the prospect of having to be in a rude rush.

I fondly remember visiting Coach once when the phone rang and he let the call go through to his answering machine. It was his way of telling me I was his guest and merited full attention. This unspoken kindness became even more meaningful seconds later after the “Beep!” when a very familiar voice could be heard leaving a message.

“That’s Bill Walton!” I said, excitedly. “You’d better answer it!”

Coach Wooden did not reach for the phone and instead told me with a devilish smile: “Heavens no! Bill calls me all the time. If I pick up he’ll talk my ear off for half an hour and then you and I won’t get to visit. I’ll talk with him later.”

I’m glad I did not have a visitor when Kurt phoned the other day while making friendship a fine art.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Friendship Turns Back Calendar

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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Familiar Laugh is

a Time Machine

H. G. Wells knocked on my front door Sunday morning and when I opened it the pages of the calendar flipped backward, months, years, four decades in all, in an instant.

Greeting me was my college roommate from freshman year. In 2019, I was 18 again.

Fingerprint analysis could not have been more accurate in identifying Matt than the proof provided by his smile. Father Time may have stolen his bushy, dark curls and added lines of wisdom to his countenance, but his grin was as broad and radiant and familiar as ever.

In the only photograph I have of Matt, for there were no ubiquitous cell phone cameras always at the ready in 1978, he is flashing his trademark electric grin as sun-bleached-mop-haired me goofily flashes a peace sign of rabbit ears behind his head.

Goofing it up as UCSB freshmen with my roommate Matt Bell.

In my mind’s eye – rather, mind’s ear – there is something even more identifying than Matt’s smile: his laugh. DNA profiling could not be more precise for identification. It is a hall-of-fame laugh, part cackle, part music.

Matt freely played that music again Sunday morning and it was more wonderful than Cheap Trick and Tom Petty and Pink Floyd making our dorm widows rattle on a Friday night.

Words of hello being insufficient after so long apart, we promptly embraced on the front doorstep – perhaps for the first time ever because college roommates in the ’70s didn’t generally hug.

The next two hours passed like two minutes as we played catch-up on our lives, our long marriages, his three children and my two plus a granddaughter, our jobs – he’s a high school principal in Northern California – and on and on. The eggs and pancakes and coffee grew cold half-untouched because the air was so warm with conversation and memories and laughter.

It’s funny sometimes what memories pop to mind. Matt was on UC Santa Barbara’s gymnastic team and while I recall him being dizzying good on the rings and pommel horse, my favorite feat of his was when he walked the entire length of our dorm hallway on his hands while the rest of us cheered as though it was the Olympics.

Matt remembered stories I had forgotten and vice-versa. Most of them I dare not share in this space, but here’s one more that I will. I had sophomorically sabotaged his toothbrush with soap and Matt retaliated ingeniously by somehow putting a small measure of sunscreen inside my tube of Crest.

As I spit and rinsed, rinsed, rinsed, Matt guffawed. I squeezed away a third of the tube to get rid of the contaminated portion and started brushing again. Again, I gagged. This happened a third time as well.

By now Matty sounded like Muttley the cartoon dog. I believe it was the only time either of us got even halfway upset at the other – in truth, I think I was mad at myself for falling for the well-played prank over and over.

Now I’m mad at myself for falling out of touch with Matt after graduation. More so, however, I’m thankful for the miracle of social media that allowed us to reconnect after 37 years.

To give you one more snapshot of what a masterpiece reunion we had, and to further encourage you to reach out to a friend you may have lost contact with, Matt and I were so busy enjoying ourselves that we forgot to take a picture together. We plan to remedy that soon.

It has been said that it takes a long time to grow an old friend, but it can also happen over breakfast.

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FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Masterpiece Friends Elevate Us

by Woody

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Masterpiece Friends Elevate

Us To The Clouds

“A friend,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, and wisely, “may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”

One such masterpiece in my life celebrates a milestone birthday today, having completed 60 voyages around the sun. Thinking of My Masterpiece Friend brings also to mind my first best friend throughout childhood.

Dan and my relationship got off to an odd start a year before starting kindergarten together when our moms, who were in the same bowling league, set up an introductory play date.

When Mrs. Means – parents did not have first names in the 1960s – called out for Dan to come into the family room to meet me, he did not appear. She tried again, slightly louder. Again, Dan did not show up or answer. Not one to yell, Mrs. Means directed me down the hallway to the last door on the right.

I found Dan’s room, but not Dan. From beneath the bed, however, came a soft rustling noise. I crept over, dropped to my hands and knees, and lifted the hanging bedspread. Hiding like a fox in a den, Dan was playing with G.I. Joes.

Dan gave me a Cold War reception, like I was G.I. Vladimir, and refused to come out. Meanwhile, I dared not crawl into G.I. Dan’s foxhole. Instead, my mental Kodachrome footage shows the strangest thing: I started doing pushups, counting aloud, “One, two, three … ten!”

Why in the world would I act like a mini-Jack LaLanne? I have no idea other than I was trying to impress Dan in the same manner I sometimes reacted when my two older brothers told me I was too puny to join their activities.

Dan eventually Army-crawled out from his under-the-bed bunker and we played G.I. Joes. Next, we fed his two pet gerbils – “Bruce” and “Wayne” in honor of Batman’s true identity – and then headed to the basement to play with Hot Wheels.

Murray was a four-legged masterpiece friend.

Dan and I were fast friends indeed, literally so at a go-kart speedway once. More accurately, that day I was his fast-and-reckless friend. On the opening lap I bumped his wheels while trying to pass and sent us both spinning into the grass infield. We were instantly expelled from the track. Instead of being ticked off at me, Dan laughed like Muttley the cartoon dog having a loud asthma attack.

Fast forward four decades. I met My Masterpiece Friend in similar fashion to how I met Dan. Instead of two matchmaking moms, a shared acquaintance set up a play date of sorts to introduce us. This time, I did not do any impromptu calisthenics.

“Make friendship a fine art,” John Wooden advised and in this vein My Masterpiece Friend is a modern Rembrandt. One example may serve as well as 100. Recently, our nearly 13-year-old boxer grew gravely ill with cancer. The day arrived when the only humane recourse was to have a veterinarian come to our home to relieve Murray’s suffering through euthanasia.

The vet, who had the couch-side manner of an angel, needed help lifting Murray onto the stretcher afterward. I risked aggravating a recent injury, although that pain would be preferable to having my distraught wife do the morose task.

Not to worry because My Masterpiece Friend dropped everything and rushed over. What is even more, I knew he would.

“What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!” wrote Emerson’s great friend, Henry David Thoreau. I can still envision Dan and me kicking the clouds with our toes while soaring on the playground swings, but My Masterpiece Friend elevates me higher still.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …