Homage to Butch.

When I was growing up I was a very skinny, puny, guy who was easily bullied. Butch was the guy who 1st became my friend, then my mentor, trainer, & finally my cousin when he married my cousin, carol, later on. Butch taught me to stand up for myself & not take any guff from anybody. He taught me how to fight & even kill if I ever had to; lucky for me I never had to. He was shorter & skinnier than me, but he was solid muscle & as fast as a rattler on the strike! He had this dream.

I read posts on forums all the time about the dreams many people have about living in the outdoors, & Butch did the same thing. I was 21, he was 22 when he started talking about the gold. He had the fever, you see. He wanted to go to the Superstition Mountains & look for the "Lost Dutchman Mine". Or Arizona, Colorado, & New Mexico to pan for gold. Then there was Alaska! That was the biggee; that was his dream. He came up with all kinds of equipment lists, including enough firearms, knives, axes, & hatchets to equip a small country. But he was married & had a couple of kids so he found himself tied down on the home-front. He never left his house to search like he dreamed about doing. He bought some land in Colorado, sight unseen, that was actually set aside for Gold-panning. Each year he was going to go out & camp on it for a week, but something always seemed to stop him.

A few years ago he went to his doctor because of a sore shoulder only to find out that he had inoperable bone cancer; the Doc gave him 6 months at
best...he lasted 8, then died; never seeing the land that he had bought & paid taxes on every year.

I miss him something fierce, yet I learned something about myself as a result. When I was around 11 years old I was going to be a magician, but for one reason or another had never stayed on the path to achieving that goal. Shortly after Butch's death I decided that I was going to live my dream, & have been persuing it ever since with really great results. I do believe in dreams, yet try to encourage people to temper them with realism. Otherwise go for it!

SARGE.