Oh, where are you, Charlie Thomas?

Yesterday was one of those days when everything just felt wonderful and right and I was on a continual glorious ride of love and laughter and play. Everything clicking, to-do items getting checked off at a good clip. Not possible (I don't think) to identify the reason or reasons for it. Just go with it and glory in it, enjoy.
    Much of the feeling remains, and I've laughed a lot today, too, despite having had to concentrate intensely much of the day on an editing task.
    But I do remember a few of yesterday's highlights:

• About 8:30, my boss emailed the members of his department to please attend a brief meeting at 11:45. A few of us buzzed about a bit what might be up. I enjoyed asking two or three colleagues, "You're near the center of the inner circle; what do you think's going to be announced?" Of course, no one knew for sure. Meeting my boss himself in the stairwell, I asked him, "So, what are you going to announce at 11:45?" He smiled in his utterly boyish way. "Now, what could it be? Maybe someone in the department got arrested? Or won the Nobel prize? Or maybe...someone's retiring?" He has worked hard and produced so much of late; we were all glad for him upon hearing the announcement.
• A little later my neighbor friend Bill telephoned with the news, "I got the job." He'd not been regularly employed for many months. Bill and I go for walks and talks occasionally. He thinks that even though I'm not religious, I'm "spiritual."
  

• My nephew whose three fine novels we tried to find a publisher for a few years ago emailed me that he was reworking his first one and would I like to help him prepare it for Amazon's Kindle format? I replied, "I'd love to be involved with your publishing project, and I'm honored to be consulted."
• When for exercise I was delivering to a friend an envelope from the mail room, I told her I recognized the name of the sender, an intern who'd worked in her office. "What a fine young man," she said. "In his third year in law school, about to go intern for a judge." I told her I'd actually been thinking about him, wondering whether he and another intern, with whom I had worked, were still...."Oh, yes," my friend said, "wedding bells soon, I think."
• After standing at my bus stop for 25 minutes after work and beginning to wonder whether I was going to have to telephone the commute van's driver to please come pick me up (never been done before), an express bus that's not supposed to service my stop (I'd not even attempted to flag it down) did stop for me. I told the driver, "I so appreciate your kind heart!"

So many nice things happened, I'm sorry that I waited too long to remember them all. But I do remember one more, the most jocular one of all.

Around two-thirty, I answered my phone and the voice sounded familiar, if perhaps a little older than the last time I'd heard it. "I just called the first person I was able to find at UNC."
    Of course, my old IBM colleague Charlie would have lost my telephone number and would need to search a website or something to locate me. The wonder was that he could remember where I worked.
    "Charlie," I said, "how wonderful to hear your voice!"
    "Charlie?" he said.
    "Yes, Charlie," I said. "It's you! And it's so good of you to call. How long has it been? Two years, three? How are you?"
    "This isn't Charlie," he said.
    "Of course it is! You sound just like you!"
    "No, really."
    "Are you sure?" I said. "The last time we talked, Charlie, you said you were getting Alzheimer's. Are you finally to the point you don't remember who you are?"
    "You don't have to have Alzheimer's," he said. "But I'm not Charlie."
    "Well," I said, "okay. Then, who are you?"
    It was a complete stranger, calling from Pennsylvania. He said his name was Mert, which I guessed was short for Merton. He was trying to get in touch with an "old Army buddy," who he thought might have gone on to be a professor of geology at the University of North Carolina.
    I took the particulars and promised to help find his old friend, if he could be found. I told him that Charlie, the last time I'd spoken with him, was herding Alpacas in a town in Ohio, next door to Pennsylvania. I told Mert that Charlie was about the same age as him and the friend he was trying to find, around seventy-five.
    "How old are you?" said Mert.
    I told him.
    "I didn't think you were a young guy. Most young people, you ask them for help, they don't want to spend more than a minute with you. Anytime I ask a young person for help, I get a geography lesson. None of them is willing to help you to the end result."

Before nine o'clock this morning, I had a telephone call from Mert's geologist. The secretary of the Carolina Geological Society, whom I'd emailed, had called him last night.
    It had been fifty years since the geologist and the man from Pennsylvania served together in the U.S. Army. The geologist thought he recognized Mert's last name, but he thought his first name might be Mervin rather than Merton.
    On the van ride home yesterday, I enjoyed telling Donna and Ina about "Mert's" call, and about my whackiness about Charlie Thomas's Alzheimer's. Today, I enjoyed telling them that I've already found Mert's old friend.
    The van arrived at the Lowes Foods parking lot, where my wife and Siegfried waited for me, in our only car until we take delivery of our new Volvo. I said to today's van driver, "Hope, thank you very much. You are the best driver in the fleet."
    A few of the others looked at me. "I mean, besides Chris and Melanie, of course!"
    General laughter. "Hey, I'm 'crazy.' It's fun."
    Donna said, "We who have admitted we're 'crazy' are on the road to recovery."
    What a day! Another one.