Friends to build a patio

April 30, 2009

Dear Patty,

Many transplants in their 20s staffed the newspaper that drew me from Missouri to the isolated California North Coast at the end of the 1970s. Strangers in a stranger land of mist and soaring trees, where earthquakes rock and the Pacific rolls, we needed each other and became instant friends.

Mike, the county government reporter, invited me to sleep on his couch until an apartment came along and to share his tall-boy beverages. Larry, a police reporter with interrogational eyes, introduced us to the Vista del Mar, a tough bar where the chalk outline of the latest murder victim was easily imagined.

Maybe we were too awed by this landscape to talk much about where we were from. Except for George, the city hall reporter from Texas. Texans must miss Texas even when they're there.

Norm, one of the photographers, had just moved across the country from Pennsylvania. He wore his hair long and curly and T-shirts and jeans almost exclusively. This was his first job out of college, so those of us a few years older adopted him like a stray puppy. We weren't going to let anything bad happen to Norm so far from home.

We had Thanksgiving dinner together, drank on the waterfront together, ate Mexican food at Luna's together, groused about editors together, played softball together. When the next wanderer arrived on our shore the circle expanded. For a time we were as much family as friends.

Fast forward to a Saturday morning three years ago. Friends in Cape Girardeau converged on our backyard to build DC a patio for her birthday. They knew it was a project we couldn't pull off on our own. We dug out the area, smoothed in gravel and laid down flat rocks. It was beautiful. While I'm an expert, no one has ever caught DC relaxing, so the patio soon was overgrown by our backyard jungle.

This year when the friends asked about DC's birthday, someone suggested reclaiming and enlarging the patio. It might have been me.

Saturday morning, our neighbors Robyn and Frank served us sausages and cheeses, breads and jams, strawberries and mimosas. Then came the gloves.

Chisel in hand, our friend Don was the impresario of the patio, fitting rocks together like a jigsaw puzzle. Frank and Charlie helped and gathered leaves that still hid the old patio. Claudia supplied Don with rocks, cataloging them according to the state of the union they most resembled. Robyn provided cake and more mimosas. In a couple of hours DC's new and improved patio was finished.

More friends like family.

I immediately placed lawn chairs and our grill on the patio to keep from losing sight of it again.

Back in California, finding girlfriends changed the equation, diminished the friends' reliance on each other. After a few years we were all off to new adventures anyway. As guys will, we mostly failed to stay in touch.

Until last week, when a you'll-never-guess-who e-mail arrived from Norm. A daughter in college and another in high school think of Norm as Dad. A photograph of them with his wife, Sharon, helped me get used to the idea.

Now he's one of those maligned editors but may resign, buy some land out in the Virginia countryside, raise some animals and grow some vegetables.

And find some friends who'll help build a patio.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.