Something for Thursday

One of the people with whom I graduated high school was a guy named Dave Donavon. Dave was never particularly a friend of mine, but he wasn't someone I disliked, either; for whatever reason, I just never got to know him all that well. We weren't in a whole lot of classes together, and I wasn't much of a social animal back then anyway, preferring to spend Friday nights hanging out at home. Dave was a good guy whom I didn't know all that well. Come to that, virtually my entire high school graduating class was good people I didn't know all that well. I'm not sure, now, how I feel about that. I don't really regret hanging out at home, reading and watching movies and writing, but I do wonder if I missed out on some awfully cool stuff when I read people on FB saying things like, "Hey, remember when...."

Dave, sadly, suffered a heart attack and died earlier this week. Naturally, in this age we're in, I learned about this via Twitter and Facebook, and a lot of the folks I'm friends with on FB from that era are posting their memories of Dave. I honestly don't have any, but it still saddens me...Dave was 40 years old, the same age as me. Judging by photos, he had roughly the same body type as me right about now. And he is, to my knowledge, the first of our graduating class to die. I suppose we're lucky in that regard, but it's also a function of being a fairly small school where the graduating class numbered around 100.

I remember that Dave was into hard rock quite a bit back in the day, and really, hard rock's a bug you don't tend to get over, even as you discover other music later in life. According to my friend Andy -- also from high school, and a guy who knew everybody -- Dave's favorite band was Van Halen, which means that Dave and I would have had some stuff to talk about right there, had any conversations happened. So, in memory of Dave Donavon, here is Van Halen with "Dreams".