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Sara Thompson (Thompson)
Tracy Dahlby sent these memories of John Flynn
Dear Classmates, I posted this recently on Facebook:
Word came the other day that John Flynn, my earliest boyhood friend in our Seattle neighborhood, had passed. Except for high school reunions, we’d been out of touch, but those early influences never went away. John and I did all the boyhood stuff of the pre-internet 50s and 60s: disputing the rules of playground football games; frequenting Saturday matinees at our seedy local movie house, where discarded candy wrappers stuck to your tennis shoes; digging backyard tunnels to who knows where; staging wargames in wooded lots that went on for days; throwing darts in the riskiest way possible. But what I remember most is that John was a literary man. When the 1958 movie based on Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea came out, we walked the neighborhood as John gave me his enthusiastic review. One blisteringly cold Saturday, we walked again, marveling at a story in Boys’ Life magazine about the lore of the Tibetan bigfoot and evidence turned up by Everest climbers. Excited, we took turns reading the paragraphs out loud, our breath forming white clouds in the air. We snapped up episodes of the Twilight Zone and endlessly debated parapsychology. In our teens, during long, slow-moving summers when life rode the rim of boredom, we kept ourselves busy reading books like Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and arguing about them on John’s front porch. Life took us in different directions. Then, two or three days after 9/11, when I was living in New York, John called to check on me, and it was a tonic to hear his humor and kindness come through, just like in the old days. RIP, old friend.
Tracy Dahlby
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Yaela