We decided to move ahead our trip plan this year after receiving an invitation to the wedding of the daughter of one of our northern cronies that was set for last Sunday.
The now seemingly routine drive north on Interstate-5 was smooth and took only about five and a half hours from Beverly Hills--where we stopped by for lunch and a side meeting--to my high school buddy Michael Lin's home in Saratoga, without the dreaded Friday evening traffic tie-up, before the sky even turned dark.
After a pleasant late night catch up with Michael and his sweet gentle wife and a good sleep at their immaculate home, we went out the next morning to meet Sophie and Sean, a friend couple who also drove over from LA yesterday, to visit their dear friends Gohan and Jiafen, with whom we also got acquainted through the Rhine River cruise we went together two years ago.
Gohan has been fighting lung cancer for over 3 years, but is still as feisty and healthy a hunk as we first met him. He was surrounded these days by his son and daughters and grand kids who came over to celebrate his birthday, besides his super-strong super-loving super-woman wife Jiafen. We chatted and sang a few inspirational songs together as Sean and Gohan's son serenaded us with their violin and piano.
Then we left to meet JK and his wife for lunch. JK had been one of my best friends in junior high but we had not stayed in touch until about a year ago. He's been a successful and well-known lighting designer/artist in Taiwan but started his residency in northern California a couple years ago just to be with his two teen-age kids who are going to school here. He shared his life-after-high-school stories with me on how he dropped out of college after his mom's untimely death and went for his first job as a professional rock singer at restaurants after the military service and then to New York City to study design for 6 years before going back to Taiwan to start his own business...
I was amazed by his resiliency and persistent love of rock music and soccer, which we both shared when we were teen-age kids but he's the one who has kept them going. He just finished publishing a CD of his own rock songs and plays soccer three times a week with macho amigos in his newly adopted resident city of San Jose, while continues to support a youth soccer league he founded sponsoring disadvantaged kids in Taiwan.
Back to Michael's house we met another high school best friend of mine, Joseph and his wife Peipei, both permanent members on my yearly must-see list. We went out to a Taiwanese shaved-ice place in Cupertino where Sophie and Sean came rejoining us for a late afternoon dessert chat time, then went back to Michael's for some delicious Chinese tamale, in commemoration of the Dragon Boat Festival that just went by last week.
After dinner, Michael's autistic but musically gifted pianist son Jefferson, along with our troubadour violinist friend Sean who carries his beloved violin around when traveling, entertained us with impromptu music and songs for a melodial closure of the day.
Then came the wedding Sunday. It was my college friend Ching-Cheng's daughter and her med-school sweet heart tying knot on a sunny scenic hill not too far from the UC Berkeley campus. All proceeded swimmingly well, as a charming and jovial wedding should be, with the high light being Ching-Cheng's choking give-away speech and the father-daughter dance that must have touched many would-be fathers-of-the-bride's hearts.
I sat at a table designated for our common college friends Ching-Cheng invited. Some of them I just met a few months ago in Taiwan, some I haven't seen for years since the dot-com days when I was making trips here for my startup, and some for the first time since our graduation decades ago... Time truly flies!
The trip back to Orange County Monday was as smooth as going north, the only road hazard being the doze attack on straight-as-arrow I-5.
All counted, I've encountered 15 buddies and friends, oldies and goodies, fun and felicity during this short long trip. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, I say 10+ friendships are worth an 800-mile round trip a year!
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