The older a friend, and the richer the shared memory, the more colorful it is to stay in touch.
And so Dad and I had a first afternoon stop planned, stopping by in Bettystown north of Dublin, before our long drive to Donegal. Roger Pickett is the father of a high school friend who fell to the floor one evening in September 1993. Young Warren Pickett at 17 had had a massive brain hemorrhage, and never got up again.
And too, those days taught me much in seeing the stoic and generous response of Roger Pickett, who immediately launched the Warren Picket Adventure Travel Award, an endowment providing pupil and parent opportunities on two annual summer trips, places on a transatlantic ‘Tall Ships’ Race and seats on a geological Grand Canyon River Expedition. My brother Pete won the first Grand Canyon trip award, and what he experienced in those 200 miles of rafting opened Pete’s eyes to a life of discovery and the wonder and beauty of our world that taught him more about who he was than his years of classroom time before that (in my interpretation). And we see the evidence in Pete’s life and spirit today (that has ricocheted across Keara and I too, I would bet any shrink would testify…!).
We sat with Roger and his wonderful wife, Liz, on a beautiful Indian summer style afternoon on the coast enjoying an Irish mezze of lunch. Roger touchingly pulled out a Sauvignon Blanc in Mum’s name on her birthday, marveling at his thick photo deck of printed pictures telling the story of Roger re-living the dream of a fourth expedition down the Grand Canyon this summer – all the more remarkable after a couple of years in skirmishes with health, including a knee replacement.
Sitting there brought thoughts back to my own trip down the river in the summer of 2021, courtesy of the Warren Pickett Adventure Travel award (as I wrote about here). Journeys like these are a reminder of what journeying is all about: experiencing the world from a new perspective, and being down in a giant crack in the earth for a week on a pair of rugged inflatable rafts with thirty other people is quite a way to do that.
Dad and I waved our goodbyes, time with Roger always feels so rich in some ways, sitting there with a man that I first sat with in a housemaster’s living room, he heartbroken and shattered in tragedy and me in a confused disbelief at how life can pan out when you have a millimeter or less of bad luck in your physiology. I’ll never forget it…
