He will always remain my childhood friend

It seemed that I faced a moment of disbelief once again after I received the phone call. In an instant, I returned to how I felt after learning my father had passed away four years ago.

My mind once again dealt with a sense of numbness that seemed to shield me from the pain trying to hit me after I was told that my friend, Dan, had passed away. I think what really hit me the hardest was the fact I never had a chance to say goodbye to him the last time we spoke several years ago.

After I received the news regarding Dan, I did what I could to block the horrible nightmare embedded deep within my subconscious that wanted to awaken. I struggled to fight back the tears in my eyes because the truth was just too much to bear.

You see, Dan and I had known each other most of our lives. It started during my days in junior high school when his younger brother and I worked as a team during at least one of our classes every day. Over time, our friendship grew and quickly led me to meet his family.

This is where I got to know Dan and the various hobbies that made him truly unique. For example, I still remember his collection of records featuring a vast assortment of music that I equally enjoyed listening to whenever I visited his parents’ home.

If memory serves, his knowledge of various music groups and the lyrics to their chart-topping songs allowed me to learn the name of a musical group whose song I had recorded off the radio a few years earlier. With the music safely stored on a cassette tape I kept at home, I had tried to figure out the name of the song and the band who sang it. For years, it remained a mystery.

This is where Dan provided me with the one piece of information I lacked – the song’s title as well as the band’s name. This is all I needed to convince my parents to take me to a music store where I tracked down the album featuring that song and immediately bought it.

To a point, Dan as well as my other friends, had one thing in common. Our personalities were very similar with regards to what we enjoyed doing, and we tended to stand out in very positive ways.

You see, none of us were part of the various cliques that others at our school had joined. Instead, we were the nonconformists who refused to cave in to peer pressure that tended to force others to join those social cliques, which often included strict rules they were forced to follow.

Instead, we dedicated our time enjoying hobbies that tested our creativity and imagination. This included playing various board games that allowed us to focus on spending time as friends versus worrying about who was going to win.

Our enjoyment playing these games took a major step forward one memorable evening when I stopped by to visit Dan and his brother. It was here that he showed me something that would take us in a direction I never saw coming.

In his hands was what seemed to be a fairly small game box compared to the others we tended to play such as Monopoly and Clue. That’s when the title emblazoned on the box cover grabbed my attention: Dungeons and Dragons.

For those out there unfamiliar with this game, Dungeons and Dragons, or D&D for short, allows players to push their imagination to a whole new level. It gives us the flexibility to choose who we wanted to portray in terms of all the characters featured in various stories of swords and chivalry we read when we were younger.

Best of all, the roles we played allowed us to take as much time as we wanted to explore the world the game introduced to us. There was no time limit. We had the flexibility to spend hours, sometimes days and weeks, tackling the various quests our heroes faced.

The idea of being able to battle a dragon using a team of wizards, knights, druids and bards was an added bonus.

It was this game we tended to spend every weekend playing since it really never had a set time limit. Once we finished one adventure, we chose to go on another and then another.

One aspect of Dungeons and Dragons I nearly forgot to mention was the one person in the group who served as the emcee, commonly known as the dungeon master. Dan typically filled that role, which required him to use his creativity to fully describe what my other friends and I witnessed through the eyes of our characters.

We then chose a course of action to deal with the various villains and dangers Dan showcased. With the roll of the dice, we learned whether we succeeded or if our characters ended up in great danger.

But that was the whole point of the game. We simply spent time together as friends with the opportunity to take as much time as we wanted to simply push our imagination and creativity to a whole new level.

Granted, there were times when we looked at the clock and realized it was well past midnight. But that was okay since we simply agreed to continue playing and then crash out on the floor and sleep until morning when we had the choice to keep playing if we wanted.

Unfortunately, my time with Dan and my other childhood friends started to fade shortly after I graduated from high school. About four months after receiving my diploma, I boarded a jet and headed to San Antonio, Texas, where I began my first days in the U.S. Air Force.

For the next 25 years, I did what I could to fly back to Ohio and spend time with my family and friends, although those times grew further apart once I got married and my wife and I started our family. However, there’s one thing that never changed over these years: Dan will always remain my good, dear friend.