Eddie Mattingly and Carol Reesor, I owe you big.

     I could write dozens of these. And I just might. But every creative road I am currently on leads to Eddie Mattingly, my friend and mentor from a small town in Western Kentucky, a good hour from any decent grocery store, but just minutes from the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln.

   I’ll spare you the details of how we met. If you want to hear that story, I’m always happy to tell it. But let it suffice that the minute I met him, I knew we’d be friends. Most everyone says that when they meet Eddie.

     When I call to let Eddie and his wife Carol Reesor know I might be swinging by their place to say hi, Eddie’s answer is always, “Come early and stay late.” And he means it. And so I usually do. Despite my many projects with their various deadlines, I always end up staying longer than I intended, and I never regret it.

     When people talk about Renaissance Men, they’re usually talking about guys like Eddie. Everything he’s ever done in life – from horses to airplanes to computers – he started as a hobbyist and ended up top in his field. Carol, now an award winning painter (a career she started late in life) is the same way. And thousands of music fans around the world have enjoyed the concerts Eddie and Carol have sponsored and promoted for more than a decade in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

     Here is a list of things that will induce smiles in all of Eddie’s and Carol’s vistors:

• Carol’s home made biscuits
• Eddie’s prized stereo and vinyl record collection
• The celebrity waterbed
• Eddie’s shouts of ‘Yeah!’ after a particularly well-played song
• Don’t start with a political discussion. Just don’t star — . Ugh. Too late.
• Their DVD library where every DVD has a card inside displaying the dates it has been watched. Eddie apparently got tired of getting halfway through a movie only to realize he had seen it just weeks ago.

Musicians and artists are a strange tribe. Much of the time we feel like circus freaks, with our weird way of seeing the world, our oddball obsession with music, art and poetry. People like Eddie and Carol make the world more tolerable for us, giving us the feeling, the very real feeling, that we belong somewhere, that we are part of something bigger than we could ever create alone.

Thank you, Eddie, and thank you Carol, from the bottom of my vagabond heart.

In the late 1970’s I first met Richard when I was working as a summer intern as a Petroleum Engineer. I had just gotten married to my wife of 35 years now and really looked up to him as an experienced engineer. One day he introduced me to a friend that had a small business with a shop in Bryan Texas. Unfortunately, I was not a strong student in my undergraduate studies and failed out of school later that year. Desperate to find a way to re-enroll in school and earn money, I reached out to him for a reference to this shop owner. Because of his endorsement, I got a part time job working in the shop while attending community college, and could earn enough to help support my wife, who was also working to support me in addition to my father. Because of people like Richard and countless others that helped me along the way, I graduated with my BS in Petroleum Engineering, obtained an MS in Petroleum Engineering after working 5 years in the industry, and later earned my MBA and have had a very successful career as an engineer.

You never know what a simple act of kindness can do to help someone in life, and I have tried to follow Richard’s example in my career. Thank you.