The perfect time

I received an instant message the other day from a college friend, John, living in Massachusetts and not spoken to in years. Sometimes such “out of the blue” communications are initiated for no articulable reason; other times, the break in the information darkness is not routine. John’s contact was of the latter sort.

John got to the point—our mutual college buddy, Dan, had stage four metastatic melanoma. Dan had visited me in Texas to attend my navy pilot winging ceremony in 1987. Was that t...