Farewell to a lifelong friend

Published 2:04 pm Saturday, August 28, 2021

“Bubba was my best good friend. And even I know that ain’t something you can find just around the corner.” ― Winston Groom, Forrest Gump.

As I sit here staring a blank screen trying to find what words to say, I’ll just open up my heart and hope what comes out will suffice. 

When I went to Central High School as an awkward tall and too-skinny freshman, one of the first people I encountered in my gym class was Tim Sherrod. Somehow we got paired up against each other on the basketball court, and the competition between us led to conversations getting started up and an eventual friendship — a friendship that would last 45 or so years. 

All through high school and college, Tim and I were as thick as thieves. Along with three other high school friends, we loaded up in my mom’s beige station wagon to Atlanta for our “senior night” at Six Flags. It was great fun, but we all were so sleepy on the way home we pulled over on a road somewhere between here and there and slept for a few hours. 

When we went to Valdosta State together, Tim asked me to go along with him up to Indiana to see the Indianapolis 500. He had family friends there who worked for the speedway, and had arranged not only for tickets but for us to sleep in the public relations building inside the track as well. 

What I didn’t know before we embarked on our journey was that Tim had just had the engine in his car replaced literally the day before. We had not gone an hour up the road before the oil light came on. We looked behind us to see a plume of bluish-black smoke coming from the vehicle. When we pulled over to check, there was virtually no oil to be found. 

So we found a Zippy Mart (remember those?) somewhere nearby and bought four quarts of oil. This routine was repeated at least 25 times during the entirety of the trip. It ended up being so ridiculous that we started saying it was “time to check the gas and fill up with oil” every time we stopped.

The A/C wouldn’t work, so we had to travel the entire route with the windows down. I will never forget us getting to Monteagle up in Tennessee and having to put the car in first gear to be able to make it up that mountain, cruising along in the emergency lane at a robust 10 mph. When two chicken trucks passed us honking their horns, we literally laughed until we cried. 

Tim was always such a supportive friend. I can’t tell you how many times I would be playing somewhere with my band and I’d eventually find his face in the crowd. He never told me he was coming to hear us play — he just showed up, again and again. 

In the summer of 1985, I got my heart broken into about 1,000 pieces. The girl I had been dating moved to work at a TV station in Tennessee, and the moment she got there with little to no explanation she dumped me like a bad habit. 

Tim proceeded to get on the phone and call the heartbreaker, and told her exactly what he thought about her and her actions. He didn’t do this because I asked him to. No, Tim just wasn’t going to stand by and let somebody jack his best friend around and not hear from him about it. 

I asked him if he thought it did any good. His response: “I don’t know, but I sure do feel better.”

That was good enough for me. 

He was one of the best men in my wedding, and I was one of the best men in his — even though I and some of our fellow lifetime compatriots took Tim out for a night on the town the night before the wedding and helped him imbibe a lot more than he should have (I mean, after all, what are friends for?). The next day he was pretty much a pale shade of green for the ceremony, his mom Mattie telling everyone that Tim didn’t feel good because he was “so nervous and excited” about the wedding. 

You can’t help but love moms that see only the good in their young’uns.

Together we went to concerts, football games (he helped me call Central’s games on the radio for years), class reunions, and just about anything else you can think of.

I ended up teaching, Tim ended up being a nurse. When work, family, and life interjected themselves into the mix we didn’t stay in touch or hang out as much as we used to. I’m sure that can be said about a lot of friendships. But any time either one of us needed the other, we both knew we were only a call away.

The last couple of years our friend Tony Herring has hosted a get together of our Central Class of ’81 fellowship of friends. It was at our last gathering at Tony’s a few months ago I last saw Tim. We told the old stories and laughed together for hours.

My lifelong friend Tim Sherrod was lost to COVID last week, only 58 years old. If I live to be 158, I won’t have many friends closer than he was.

And even I know that ain’t something you can find just around the corner.