I lost a dear friend this week.

Decades ago, when I first moved to California and knew literally no one, he and I would spend at least some time together every single day. No doubt that was helped by the fact our apartments were interior ones, back-to-back on the second floor of the same building. And the fact we happened to work for the same company, he in internal auditing and me in the corporate treasury department.

Most weekends we spent at least one of the days — sometimes both! — riding our bikes to and from and along the beach. When we weren’t doing that, we might be driving around Southern California, enjoying the scenery and shooting the breeze. I learned an immense amount about the geography and history of my new home during those trips.

Sometimes we’d take longer ones. I still remember how awed I was hiking and camping in Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Park. And noticing how smelly Los Angeles smog was when we came back. Another trip, up Mt. Wilson, let me see first-hand the crud we were all breathing back in those days — Los Angeles looked like a desert, bounded by the mountains and the sea, because the smog was so bad.

There was rarely a week when we didn’t eat dinner at least one night at “that hole-in-the-wall Mexican place” whose name I never learned but which introduced me to my lifelong love of Mexican food. We hit quite a few other restaurants, too, often with other friends from our apartment complex (thanx, Steve, for being such a great cruise director!).

As time often does, we drifted apart over the years. Life has a way of doing that. But we never lost touch. If we rarely had dinner together anymore, we regularly spoke on the phone. The range of those conversations was immense, because that’s the kind of person he was. His wife (another dear friend), when she called to tell me of his passing, told me the book he took with him to hospice was “Raising Capital for Dummies”. He was always learning and loved to challenge himself with new ideas.

His health had declined in the last few years. But while the Parkinson’s may have made him a quarter of a step slow on rejoinders it hadn’t impacted him too severely when he passed. Sad as I am that he’s gone, I’m glad he was spared the sometimes more serious end-stage aspects of that awful disease.

And the life advice?

I’d been thinking over the last year or so that I really ought to get up to see my old friend. I had even begun planning the longest motorcycle trip I’ve ever considered to do that…but now it’s too late.

Nobody gets out alive, and the future is promised to no one. Make the time to share the time with old friends. It’s fitting that the friend who taught me so much taught me that, too.

Requiem en pace, Bill Watt.