“Oh God, he was my life. You couldn’t miss him. He was big. 6’3” and 200 lbs, and he was so alive. Wayne always stopped for life. That’s one thing he taught me, if you want fullness in life, you have to stop for it. He’d pull over on the side of the road to explore a creek. Or to look at a piece of road kill. Or he might visit a friend to help fix a roof, and end up staying the entire week. By the time Wayne left, the whole house would be renovated. He could fix anything. He once found a Model T in the woods and had it working in days. He was a complete genius like that. But one unfortunate thing about Wayne, he wasn’t a doctor oriented person. So by the time we discovered the cancer, it had already spread to his lungs. We were arrogant at first. We thought we could beat anything. But it was only a matter of time. A few weeks before his death, we were hanging out, smoking hash, and talking about what to do with his ashes. Suddenly Wayne picked up the vial of hash, looked at it closely, and told us he had an idea. It took a lot to get that man down. Wayne wanted to live until his 54th birthday, and that’s exactly when he died. You can’t grieve for a man like that, so we threw him a ‘fun’eral. We had bluegrass music and two bushels of Chesapeake Bay crabs. And as a parting gift, every attendee received a vial of Wayne’s ashes. There were hundreds of them. We only requested that each recipient share where their vial ended up. Mine got mixed into some ink and tattooed on my finger. The other vials have gone all around the world: seven continents, so many bodies of water, the Wailing Wall, the Great Barrier Reef. Wayne’s in two different volcanoes. A sarcophagus in the Louvre. He’s even in the evidence room of a Georgia prison, because one of our friends got arrested with Wayne in his pocket. Wayne would have loved that. That’s such a Wayne place to end up. You could never contain him. Not when he was alive. Not when he was dead.”
#quarantinestories
