Friends. Acquaintances. Strangers.

There are people, and then, there are people. There are people that you know and there are people that you do not know.

Our world revolves around the people we let into our lives. They come, they stay a while, they go. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they do not. But in a way they never leave. The mind is a funny thing. It holds a special depository of life, living and moving on. It retains some good, some bad. It mellows with age, placing perspective on the passion, the emotion, the value of friends, acquaintances, strangers.

Dorothy, the substitute mother in charge of the Buena Park Teen Center in the old Firehouse on Ninth Street. She made Friday night special. The inside walls of her old fire station kept countless kids from ever looking out through the chains of a jail house fence.

Coach. Gosh? What was his name? He taught a bunch of kids how to craft a baseball field out of the raw dirt in the back of Calder Middle School. He would be a field day for lawyers today. Twelve, thirteen year old kids taking turns dragging a chain net behind an old school bus to level the infield. Hot, sweaty kids, not knowing that heat exhaustion was a step away, learning about life, work, living, responsibility. Memories and values built in the dust of an early summer Saturday.

Professor Grob. Granny Grob to the freshman class of 1967. Her strange perspective about God, creation, and the world made curiosity a requirement, accepting for the sake of accepting, a sin.

Ron Yielding, gone in recent months, a first boss with a soft gift of teaching and friendship that keeps giving near forty years later. Don Fox, a mentor, not appreciated at the time, but taken for granted until it was too late to say thank you. An endless list of people, conversations, experiences, and relationships too numerous to list, too valued to leave behind.

People come and go in a life, but they stay forever. Their chemistry mixes to become who you are and what you are. The alchemy is far too complex to understand. Indeed, It may be the case that understanding would rob the beauty of what once was, but will always be a part of you in the mosaic of friends, acquaintances, and strangers you have known and are yet to know.