It was my freshman year in college in a state that I continue to hate. I as usual had a slanted grin on my face, but it was a little bit off. My nose was curled up a bit.
“Joe, what the #@&% is that smell?”
I admit that my regenerated form of vocabulary was not fully developed at that particular time and place.
“Dude!” and a muffled laugh discharged from a similarly contorted nose was all that he replied.
Joe’s the kind of guy that any father should be proud of. I have many recollections of Joe Miller, this one’s in a two light bulb parking lot outside of Sulfur, Louisiana on the front side of dawn.
We were close to where Joe grew up. I looked around trying to imagine what it would be like living here.
“Is it like this all the time?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s the sulfur,” he said. He was smiling too. I couldn’t tell if that smile revealed a joy to be back in Sulfur or to be back in Sulfur and not be living in Sulfur any longer. I didn’t ask.
“Let’s get the #@&% out of here. It #@&%ing stinks!” I said laughing. We now had enough gas to make it to Florida.
I met Joe’s family once and they seemed really nice. Joe was really nice and my parents hated him. My father is a terrible judge of character. But he wasn’t alone in his assessment of Joe Miller.
At Texas it would seem that half the swim team’s nose curled at Joe and it had nothing to do with smell. Frankly, a lot of people thought Joe was stupid.
Joe is the most dyslexic individual I have ever met.
I remember showing up to pick Joe up for summer school one day after a late night of heavy drinking. There was a note taped to the door. If you tried your hardest you couldn’t capture dyslexia the way that two sentence note did. A schizophrenic ferret on crystal methamphetamine couldn’t capture the chicken scratch that told me that Joe was dealing with something undiagnosed.
He had just completed his sophomore year in college and had not yet been diagnosed with dyslexia. I am tempted to write, “I have no idea how he did it” because he had trouble spelling his own name but Joe is a really smart guy. You have to be to make it as far as he did without being diagnosed with something as serious as what he was dealing with. Someone less intelligent would have ended up on the other bus to a different school.
I met Joe 15 years ago. Time goes by really fast. We remain good friends to this day and don?t stay in touch much as good friends often don’t. We don’t need to. We’re both busy. We’re both married with two kids. And we both know that if we ever needed help that we would be there for each other, no matter what.
Joe has a huge house in Hawaii, and owns several very successful businesses. He spends the kind of time with his kids a psychiatrist never spends with their kids. He has all the money he needs. He has a secretary that will read his mail to him. But he doesn’t really need her to. He can read, though admittedly very slowly. He read 24 books last year.
I visited with him in Hawaii a couple years back. He seemed really happy. Like all of us he has bad days that he takes in stride, the same way that he has handled being dyslexic. Recently in an email he typed perfectly, “Spelling is not everything. As you well know, there are many avenues to success and one must search within to find their strengths and weaknesses and focus on the strengths.”
I should stop right there. That one sentence is the message of this Aqua Notes. You should reread it.
A person shouldn’t be judged for where they are from, or how they wear their hair, or what brand of clothes they wear, or how well they spell or swim. Of all those that judged Joe none are doing as well, or are as happy as he is. Life may throw some shit at us from time to time but in the end life is what you make it and you get what you deserve.
Joe deserves to be happy. He is a really smart guy and one of my heroes.
Here’s to you, Joe. Congratulations on the birth of Sage. Continued success!
Your friend,
Gary Hall Jr.
