For lack of any real content—plenty of ideas, no form to them—I’ll tell another of my stock stories. [Yes, Mark, you get a post here.]

I don’t know how many Webloggers are like me, but I am quite prone to telling the same stories to most everyone in my life at some point or another. It occurs to me that I could write a number of stories about how I met various of my friends, so of those with whom I meet on a regular basis, let me start with the person I’ve known the longest—Rick King.

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Rick and I are both alumni of The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science. I graduated in 1997, and Rick was a year behind me in 1998. [This is the point in the story where Rick shouts as loudly as possible, "But I still graduated college before you did!" Yes, by all of a week. Shut up, Junior.] Rick was a “legacy”, as his older brother, Chris, had graduated in 1995. I’d never met Chris, but I’d interacted with him before—he was the systems adminstrator of Garfield, the P90 Linux box that was our email and Web server my two years in Columbus. [Ooooh, the loooooxury.]

Chris had a reputation as a bit of a hardass and a bit, well, brusque. [He's a nice guy, but in an official position, it's always easy to be seen as an asshole. I know this all too well!] Chris was easily lampooned by the typical MSMS coder-geek—your typical anti-establishment, “Can I hack this?” type of geek. I never will forget to logging in to Garfield in March of my senior year and seeing that someone had sniffed a super-user account, rewriting /etc/motd to say, “CKing is a dork.” In fact, Chris’s unfortunate login—cking—was often preceded by capitals of the sixth and twenty-first letters of the English alphabet. [Teenagers are sooooooo cute.]

As such, when my class of juniors saw that Richard P. King had been accepted into the Class of 1998, there was a collective groan—”Oh, man, this guy’s going to be worse than his brother.” Why we held Rick—whom few of us had met!—in such low esteem is really beyond me, other than the natural end-game of MSMS groupthink.

As I moved into Peyton Hall for my senior year, I passed by my old room—E205—on my way to my new one—E214. I scanned the printout on the door: “Rick King / Daniel Schwartz”. Great, I thought, I have Asshole Legacy-Boy in my old room. Dorm rooms at MSMS take on the character of any room at any such small, prestigious school—you feel some sense of connectedness, no matter how large or small. [That's why I had such a visceral reaction upon seeing photos of Peyton Hall after being hit by a small tornado---it was as if my own home had been destroyed.] I mulled putting off the inevitable—meeting Rick—but I decided to get that over with my first night in the dorm.

I think my original intention was to scare the pants off of Rick. I don’t know why this should have worked—I was dealing with a legacy, someone whose brother had actually been through the rougher, meaner years of MSMS, back when “bucking” was something that actually happened, rather than something that was mentioned only at the expense of a Level I writeup. [Bucking is the fully-clothed simulation of male-male copulation. I re-wrote that sentence five times to try to come up with something that Google won't spider. ] I told hoary old MSMS stories, scaring only Evan Tran, who, as we all soon learned, seemed to be scared by lots of things. Rick was, however, unfazed.

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Rather than annoying the ever-loving crap out of this King guy, I actually made a friend. It’s funny how our best intentions are foiled to our great benefit. Close living proximity and similar backgrounds—military kids, relatively mainline Protestants, some Midwestern background mixed in the Southern raisin’—gave us a common background from which we could draw during the slow times. Similar pursuits and God-given skills—academic, music, and social—gave us shared experiences. We attended different universities—much to my chagrin—but we kept in touch. He followed me to Huntsville, and we grew closer. I’d go to him with most anything, and I have.

On the biggest day of his life to date, I was standing behind him.

I’m sure that, on a similar day, he will reciprocate.

I love that story, and, truth be told, I love the guy, too.