Happy Birthday JEC!

I'm starting to realize just how much of a challenge it's going to be blogging for everyday of December.  I had to sit here for awhile and think of a topic I really wanted to write on today.  I settled on today's date...11 DEC...and the fact that it's the birthday of my good friend Jonathan.


I have lots of good memories of growing up with Jonathan, mostly from high school.  Both of us went to Aylor Middle School and James Wood High.  We were part of a small area in our county where the lines were drawn just right to include our neighborhoods in the group whose kids would keep going to James Wood after the new Sherando High School was built (Sherando drew from Aylor).  All of us went to James Wood for one year and then the split happened.  About 3/4 of the people we knew from middle school went to the new high school while we went to join all these people from the other county middle school that we'd sorta known for about a year.  It was a tough transition, but Jonathan and I stuck together through it.  We had two other really good friends through it all that are in the pics below, Nathan and Danny.  Reagan is also in the first pic with us and was a good friend of all of ours too.

I wanted to put together a list of good memories, but I quickly realized that waaaay too many of them should probably not just be blasted out to the masses of the internet.  I'm sure Jonathan will appreciate this. Suffice it to say that we had some really cool times together over the years, had a falling out of sorts after high school and then reconnected years later when we were both a good bit older and wiser.

The first two pics below were taken at one of our favorite hangouts, Ruth's Tea Room.  My sister introduced me to this place probably about the time I was a freshmen in high school.  I loved the place and I brought lots of my friends here, but the four or five of us were a regular group.  It was this laid-back little diamond in a semi-rough neighborhood.  I don't remember a sign out front; you had to know the place was there or have someone take you.  Velvet wallpaper, black floors, mirrors on the walls, candles on our tables, the old jukebox playing 33s and 45s (sometimes at the wrong speed), and Vivian (Ruth's daughter and the proprietor) serving us all kinds of cool teas.  Sadly, the city razed a bunch of old buildings on this block a few years back and Ruth's Tea Room was one of them, but I still have great memories of being there with these guys.

I think of our friendship now as one those where you may not see each other for quite a long time, but when you do you just pick up right where you left off.  And as I recall, we were last hanging out in Winchester having a great time laughing about something or other.  So Happy Birthday Jonathan (for the last 1 1/2 hours or so)!  I hope it was a great day.  I just hope you didn't go driving through a field in your dad's truck and smash up the side...or spray paint a bridge over I-81...or jump off the upstairs deck into a 4' pool...etc, etc, etc...

1996 - The Tea Room - (clockwise) Nathan, Reagan, Danny, Jonathan, Andy (damn I look rough WTH???)

The Tea Room circa 2001 - (clockwise) Nathan, Danny, Jonathan, Andy

The Brew Pub 2011 - (L to R) Andy, Jonathan, Danny, Nathan