School Story:
If you know me you know that I had a best friend that was with me all the time. If I had a girl friend that I was going out with he would find someone to date just so that we could double date. If my dad was taking me to the farm to work on the weekends he would come along just to spend time with me in the hot sun working in the field picking up rocks, picking okra, and building a log cabin. He kicked a bully's ass in elementary school that was bothering me when I did not have the guts to stand up to him. One week when I was on vacation he got together with a girl friend of mine and his guilt was so strong that he waited out in front of my house until I got home to tell me what had happened. When I moved into my first house he took a weekend of his life to show me how to lay ceramic tile in my Kitchen. We went to preschool, kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high school and even college together. We were roommates our first year and joined a Fraternity together. Some people that know him would say that he was accident prone when he was young. I can say that he totaled more cars than I have owned. He broke his arm falling into a concrete drainage ditch, got his fingers caught in his bicycle chain and sprocket, broke his back on my 3 wheeler, got a concussion playing back yard basketball, got tackled from behind in the hall at HMS with his arms pinned at his side which caused him to land on his jaw which broke it, with my assistance caught my backyard on fire, threw my brother out of the back of my dads truck on a dirt road at the farm at speed, something happened to his face that I cannot remember but he has a bad scar on his cheek from it. One night at school in Birmingham he went with some fraternity brothers Spelunking in a cave. The group had been gone for several hours so I began to worry. I gathered a couple of friends and we went to the cave in Warrior AL to find them at midnight. It had been raining hard all night and everything was muddy and washed out. Their car was still there and there was no sign of them. We went in and discovered that the water level in the cave had risen while they were in there and that they had been trapped in there for several hours. We were able to get them out finally safe and sound. They all thought they were going to die in there. After college he decided to go on to law school. I went to work in Huntsville while he was finishing school in Bham. He came back here to practice and became a successful attorney. We still remained friends but nothing like we had been in the past. He had a career and 2 small children as did I. His brother called me on Dec. 19th 2004 at 7pm to tell me that he was missing again on a hunting trip this time but this was different this time he wasn't coming home. His name is Benjamin Lee Boyanton and he fell out of a tree stand and died. I never got to tell him how much he meant to me.
