Walk in the Park with Brad May 11

 Hayter for May 11, 2025

“A Walk in the Park”

            Last week, Brad Meyer and I took another walk in the park. The experience is embarrassing to me. Let’s face it, we were once two racquetball-playing grown men, and now we’re two old guys walking in an area where children are playing.

I knew it would come to this. Just not this soon in my life. If Brad could find a healthy person he could still beat, he would be in the gym at this very minute. But no. Now the two of us are walking, talking, and taking turns listening.

We have been friends for a good while, yet I’ve never heard Bradly call me by my name. I’m liable to call him Bradford, Bradson, and on occasion, Brad. He calls me “Hey” and “You.” As in, “Hey, you wanna go get breakfast?”

For the three of you who wouldn’t know Brad Meyer from Oscar Mayer, I’ll give you a short biography: Over the years, he has been everywhere and done everything. --  I take that back. He’s never done anything in Oklahoma or Madagascar.

 obs than is healthy. He’s been a hotel manager in several locations, an emcee for various musical groups, and he used to referee boxing matches. He got the job by asking someone if he could. Son of a gun, he had a calling. He’d call out, “No head butting!” and “Okay, break it up! Back to your corners!”

Most of you remember Bradly from his articles with The Courier and a few other publications. He wrote on a wide range of topics. On occasion, he’d review plays at the Crighton. For a while, he involved himself in reviewing restaurants. I thought him too honest to be a food critic. Eventually, he asked if I would join him in his food reviews. We eventually developed online videos of our restaurant reviews. A few of the episodes are still on YouTube. Eventually, his wife Nancy replaced me. She was a much better choice.

If we can get past the story of Brad Meyer, I’d like to return to our walk in the park. It was a walk, the distance of which had been shortened a bit by the flooding of the west fork of the San Jacinto River. The dam had apparently been opened a bit to lower the level of Lake Conroe, in anticipation of more rain. That’s just my guess. -- No one clears stuff with me.

While the river was flowing fast and high, the park was flooded with youngsters. This occurred on Cinco de Mayo. It commemorates a historical event that took place in 1862. That was when the people from a town in Mexico tried to overthrow the French, who had taken over the country because Mexico owed them money. The U.S. didn’t try to help our neighbor because we were involved in a Civil War at the time. – I only brought the topic up because I thought it was the reason youngsters were playing in the park on a school day. 

The parents of these children paid no attention to the fact that the fifth of May is no longer considered a day off for public schools in Texas. Perhaps the mob of children at the park were homeschooled. None of the Hayter children were homeschooled. That was because it was against the law to homeschool healthy kids when I was young. It was a law passed mostly by hordes of Texas mothers. Elsie Hayter participated in the march. Probably. 

There was not only a horde of children at the park, but also an attractive couple all dressed for a wedding. I thought they intended to get married in the park until I noticed a photographer taking pictures of them in beautiful areas of the park. 

It reminded me so much of what Kay and I didn’t do before our marriage. I had been working for the Texas Forest Service at their District 6 headquarters just south of Conroe. Kay and I had planned to get married during the Christmas Holidays, but the TFS dispatcher, Rodger Parker, recommended we get married during the Thanksgiving Holidays. I thought my old friend was a genius! 

When I told Kay about the idea, she was all for it. So, we got married in Pasadena in the preacher’s office, with our folks present. Kay and I had attended so many weddings of family and friends that we chose not to make a big deal out of ours. The fact that we couldn’t afford a big wedding had a little to do with our decision. But, for the most part, we just didn’t care to go to all of the trouble. We missed out on some gifts, but then we already had a toaster. 

Speaking of a toaster is only marginally related to Brad and me walking in the park. See how much Bradly gets me off topic? During our rest stop, midway through our journey, Brad and I got into a discussion about the speed of light. Brad was unaware of my last article, where I mentioned a recently located planet 120 light years from Earth. I had read that if we could travel twice the speed of light, we would not only be going really fast, but we would end up back in time.   

Brad stopped me right there. He said that it’s impossible to go back in time. That going beyond the speed of light would merely slow down time. I had seen several movies and TV series about space flight, so I knew I was right. That was when I told Bradford that we should finish the last leg of our walk. 

He said, “Sure. Hey, you wanna go get breakfast when we’re through?”

 end

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