Matthew Lyle Landsman

As a writer, today is a goldmine for composing words to describe an enduring love and the romance of this moment. As a friend to both Nita and Terry, today is the fruition of decades of fishing and wishing for a glad moment in time…one that revives the faith in happy endings, in romance, and in the simple premise that while life is often a chore, a bore, a routine without much in the way of the “things worth writing home about”.  And there is that collection of amazing things we achieve in the midst of unremarkable times. But that life can also be amazing on a daily basis while we toil with the mundane…If life is lived with the right partner…with your best friend. Today we are privileged to live   vicariously and share in the collateral wave of joy that has overtaken my two friends and will carry them for the duration.

Terry and I have been friends since the middle 70s…and though I left Rainier in 1977, the friendship has endured and matured and actually gotten better over the decades. We ran one season of track together…Lord, he was fast. The view I always had was of him getting farther away and smaller during that lap of the track. But at the end of the day, he never gloated over his gift, and we were equals except for a short time after the starting gun. Today, there is but the glad memory of our having been running buddies so long ago…

In 1975, Terry stormed into a stormy Tillamook for a little game of football on a Friday evening in the fall…as he recalls; the muddiest and worst weather he ever played in…and he left there with a victory…and the attention of some of her citizens. A few days later, at another muddy, rain and windswept field in Rainier, I walked the sidelines with Terry who was in street clothes this time while we took in a JV football contest. And the scenery on the far sideline that was the opposition’s cheerleaders was more than tantalizing. It is now more than obvious that a little blue eyed freezing and shivering, yet still smiling and captivating in all her tiny glory caught Terry’s eye on that happily fateful night. It appears we all became friends in an instant, but I had no idea that while her and I spent the next few years as pen pals (remember pens and postage stamps), that in the midst of the rain and fall coastal fury, she and my friend Terry were to build a small fire that survived as warm coals and embers for over thirty years. And though they were to eventually drift away from one another, and I was to also lose track of her too…true friends never are forgotten.

I still have the notes she sent first from Wilson River Highway in Tillamook, then from a college in Bend.

Life goes on; all three of us grew up, raised our kids and did what old friends do. We wondered how the lives of our friends had turned out. A few years ago I found Nita in Bend…and after a couple years of being e-mail pen pals again, I found myself in Bend for the first time, to witness another Rainer football game there on neutral ground…And it was on that cold and cloudless night that she and Terry were to again meet after three decades…Ironic to have our again shivering Tillamook cheerleader in our midst, but this time sitting on the Rainier sideline between the two us, cheering on a different generation of combatants there…I hardly need tell what happened next…another Rainier victory, and two pink cheeked souls were smitten once again…Gotta love this happening for my good friends…

I gotta be honest. I’ve never known Terry to be this happy on a daily basis…even while dealing with the rigors of life, there has been a prevailing glad overture around him…and the music of his life has taken on a lovely tone. Nita is the salt of the earth…a mother, a great sister and daughter, but mostly a fantastic friend. Years ago I was speaking to my brother in law about my life, my numerous friends, my social circle and network of people. He spoke simply and eloquently…”I don’t need a lot of people in my life. I have what I need without all that. When I got married, I didn’t just marry your sister…I married my best friend. She’s all I need.” Here’s to words well spoken, and here’s to my lifelong friends today having married their best friend….I love you guys…MLL