As He Lay Dying-4

Time's passage allows for grief to recede slightly and the preceding years' shared experiences to come more sharply into focus. Life proceeds, and for those of us with children, it proceeds apace.
And then, in the midst of the hectic nature of life, events long past creep through, carrying along on their currents a mixture of amusement and sadness and lives lived and offering, however fleeting, moments of reflection.
For Dave and me, I've often used fishing as a prism through which to view our relationship. That's not unique; I think other people have covered that ground, that of the bond between those who fish. We fished consistently, sometimes quietly, other times boisterously, sometimes conversing, sometimes not and sometimes drinking. Partying might be an equally valid window through which to view our shared experiences. We fished, we drank, we smoked, and sometimes we did all of them at once.
But in a relationship covering roughly 30 years, we did other stuff too. Like the time we went to J.C. Penney so Dave could get suitable clothes for a job interview? The blind leading the sartorially blind. Yes, that looks quite respectable, I offered, as a 24-year-old whose taste in clothes was fashioned by a product of the Depression mother, she who allowed me to attend school sporting desert boots through which my toes poked. 
And the job to which those clothes, so carefully selected, led him somehow involved us going to an Indian, as in Native American, ceremony. To break it down, he somehow hitched on to a sort-of headhunter firm (based on his management degree), and the guy to whom he was assigned fancied Indians. So off we trekked, into the wilds of New Jersey, to experience the rain dance and the hawkers of turquoise jewelry. During the course of that trip, we discussed the responsibilities required of such a job. The guy who liked Indians also happened to manipulate people for whom he found jobs by appealing to their parents if they, the job seekers, balked: "I'm sorry, Mrs. Jones, your son's not there? Can you please tell him that the people who offered the $80,000-a-year job would like an answer?" I, maybe  idealistically, objected to the tactics, while Dave objected to my objection. But, eventually, he came around and saw things my way.

Somewhere around that time we took a New Year's Eve trip to the Poconos to visit our friends who had rented a cabin for the occasion. The most memorable part of the night was when Kevin, who I didn't know and perhaps have seen once since, ran from one room to the next, jumped, arms spread, and farted in his unsuspecting girlfriend's face as she sat on the couch. To which she replied, memorably: "Kevin, that was most vile." Dave pointed him out to me on subsequent occasions through reference to the flying fart.
On the way home from that trip, on New Year's Day, we detoured to a small airport and subsequently found ourselves in a small plane circling the mountains. When I asked the pilot about his qualifications, as we were coming in for a landing, he said he received his training right there at that little airfield. And later, Dave said to me that I expected him to say he received his training in Vietnam. He was correct, I expected his credentials to extend beyond the community airfield. But as we floated above those mountains, we transcended for a while the trials that awaited us upon our return. We lived through it, as we did so many other circumstances...