Sometimes When You Google Search Your Birthday, You'll Find An Old Friend...

In church today they talked about family history. Mormons, of which I am one, hold their ancestors in high regard and doing genealogy work is not just recommended, but commanded. We feel that there is work for those of us living that needs to be done in the name of those who've passed.

All the talks on genealogy and family research piqued my interest, so much so that when I came home, I decided to do some investigating. I looked up information on my father--even found his discharge information from the army at the end of WWII. And, as I'm wont to do at times, I did some google searches. One of the searches was the day I was born.

I didn't expect to see one of the results.

The search turned up an obituary of a college friend, Deron Dickmann.

Deron and I were born on the same day, he in Kentucky and me in Utah. You've probably heard the stat that if you put 30 people in a room, there's a 50/50 chance that two of you share the same birthday. I apologize if I've gotten that statistic wrong, but it's something like that. Back in college we had more than 30 brothers in our fraternity and Deron and I shared both a date of birth and birth year.

I haven't thought about Deron in a long time. He was funny and very social. Seeing his name again I remember the times we'd all go dancing at Club Xenon or we'd go see a movie. Back in college it seemed we had a lot of free time (and the $$ to afford such activities...). If Facebook existed in those days, he would have loved it and we would have loved the posts he would have shared.

 He was diagnosed with leukemia and was responding well. The strokes took away much of the abilities he loved to do. He watched his brothers graduate and get married and even have kids--all things he very much wanted to do, but never got the chance.

Deron passed away almost twenty years ago. I can't believe it's been that long. I've meet several people who were born on the same day as me, but never one born the same day and year. And I've never met anyone quite like Deron and I'm sure I never will again.