by 
Today, I was driving on Riverside when I had the sudden and overwhelming urge to go see my friend Dano. I was near I35 and had nothing really scheduled, so on a whim I made the drive to Kyle.
It turns out he was in a bad place, overwhelmed with anxiety and not feeling well physically. I stayed for a couple of hours; he wanted me to talk, “tell stories,” and just hang around. Honestly, nothing going on in my day was more important than that. When he was ready to rest, I left.
On the way back into town, I made the circle back to Riverside where I’d started and pulled in over at Auditorium Shores to do a short 4-mile, get-something-on-the-workout-log run. I’d missed the early morning group due to the storm and the later morning group because traffic was just so bad I couldn’t get there in time. So I still needed a workout. It was nothing special, just a fairly (well, more like largely) mediocre run on an incredibly humid afternoon. I was a sopping bucket of sweat when I finished.
As I pulled out of the parking lot and made my way past the round-about, a hawk came swooping over the road in front of the car. Two little birds were in hot pursuit. As I drove on, the hawk led the way, the two little birds right behind, all three directly in front of my windshield. It was like a fighter jet escort. They stayed in front of me almost all the way to the light at Lamar and then broke left and flew away.
It made me smile and think, again, of my friend Dano.
