This past Saturday, I got a call that I’d been dreading: my friend of 31 years, Wayne Maynard, had succumbed to heart ailments. He was 75. In about an hour, I’ll head down to North Carolina for a remembrance.
Wayne and I met almost as soon as I arrived to start my doctoral work in political science at The University of Alabama in May of 1992. I was just out of the Army, a casualty of the post-Cold War drawdown, and he was a retired Green Beret major two years into the program. We became fast friends.
The photo atop the post, taken from his funeral home obit, looks to have been taken somewhere around the time that our time in Tuscaloosa overlapped. It’s how I mostly think of him, even though we saw each other periodically over the years after our careers moved us apart geographically.
The changing perspective of time is a funny thing. While I fancied myself a grizzled veteran, I was 26 and single with a whole lot to learn about the ways of the world. Wayne was 18 years older, married with grown kids, and two decades of adventure courtesy the US Army. That, combined with a head start in the program, made him a natural mentor.
He grilled me many a steak, eventually teaching me to eat them medium rare. Even escapist shoot-’em-up movies became teachable moments when watching them with a retired Green Beret and former Ranger School instructor.
Twenty years of service came with a pension that, as he liked to say, paid him “$30,000 a year just for breathin’.” He frequently employed a “Your money’s no good here” approach, cognizant of my financial circumstances at the time. It’s an approach that I adopted myself, paying it forward many times over with younger colleagues as my career advanced.
At some point, he introduced me to his concept of “Bozeman, Montana friends.” Men would develop friendships that would withstand long separations. Those friends could not have talked for ten years, call the other at 2 am, and say “Hey, man. I’m in jail in Bozeman, Montana and need you to bail me out.” And they’d do it, no questions asked, and hash out the recriminations later.
Thankfully, neither of us ever needed the bail money. But, as he moved off to North Carolina for his wife Peggy’s career and I moved to the DC area for mine, we saw each other less. We talked on the phone regularly for years but less so over time. He was never much for reaching out and I did so less after I had kids.
Still, when we did re-connect we’d pick right off where we left it. We stopped by his house a few times over the years when traveling nearby and talked on the phone with some frequency. But not as much as we should have.
