I am now 84+ and I look back and see few friends. I grew up in a neighborhood with few young families in it. I "hung out" with my grandfather and his brother, my grand uncle as they did their business needs. The biggest group I had was when my Dad came home from the Navy after WWII and we moved from Texas to Kansas. The group of children was so big that a pecking order had developed and you found where you fit in by violence. Then we moved to a newer place with a smaller group, and I found my place the only I knew. From there, we moved to a suburb with no one my age. I had few friends in High School, grades were more important than friends. At College, I lived in a Frat house, but was too much like any large group I had known. It wasn't until I went to work for IBM in the local branch office, that I made a few friends both with fellow employees and customers. As a working stiff, I never went out drinking with fellow workers, I always came home to my wife and six children (created over time). I will admit that I often tended to work long hours to get the job done. As I got older, I advanced in my career which involved week-long meetings with customers and oher IBMers (seven such meetings a year out of town). I also had internal meetings every six weeks that lasted a week designing how to share data across networks (Distributed Data Management Architecture DDM). After I retired, I had very little contact with my co-workers. My "Best Friend" was my wife and I miss her a lot--she died of ALS in 2015. She became a Research Tech at Mayo working on researching the immune system definition. Charts have been printed that show the processes of the immune system. The charts are not complete. They have several areas marked where between steps in a process known as "Magic happens here!" She spent time and energy studying the magic and trying to find what was really going on. She helped redefine the structure of white blood cells or dendritic cells. The first microscopic pictures were two dimensional, one slice which showed dendrites (arms) coming off of the cells. Using an electron microscope, she took several pictures of the cell at different slices/levels of a cell. Then she built a 3-d model of the cell and dendrites became continuous veils. It is the veils that seem to grab offensive (bad) cells and destroy them.

She also helped Rochester, MN government verify the water source for the city water. Apparently Southern Minnesota has an underground lake below the Jorden rock layer (300-500 feet down) that supplies the water for most of the people from the Twin Cities south to the Southern border of Minnesota.