Saturday morning was hot and getting hotter. Classic August “dog day of summer” in West Georgia. We had driven just up the road into Fayetteville to watch the son of an old college friend play soccer. Robert and his beautiful wife Callie were in town from Mountain Brook for a tournament with their travel team, and we had not seen them or their two kids in at least two or three years, maybe longer. The kids have grown so much since the last time we saw them at their place in Mountain Brook. Funny how quickly that happens.

Their team won the morning game and would eventually go on to take first place in their group with a 3-0 victory on Sunday afternoon – gold medals all around! But almost immediately after the game ended, Robert looked at me and asked what was apparently the most important question of the morning: “Did you drive the wagon? Let me see it!”

Of course I did.

Robert and I share an appreciation for fast European cars. A few years after we finished at The University, Robert bought a black-on-black E39 BMW M5 that he kept for several years – naturally aspirated V8, rear-wheel drive, manual transmission. I think he was living in Mississippi at the time. I had lusted after that car from the first time I read about it after it made the cover in one of my car magazines sometime in the late 1990s (Automobile, Road & Track, Motor Trend…I had subscriptions to them all in high school and then for many years after…). I probably still have those magazines somewhere. I say probably – I know I do. They are in a box in the basement.

I rode in Robert’s M5 once when we were down in Mobile for our buddy Pope’s wedding. That had to have been nearly 18-20 years ago now, which is a little hard to believe. Robert, Pope and I still have a group text that is almost always fresh and lively, but especially so during Alabama football and basketball games.

Robert eventually sold the M5 after he and Callie moved to Colorado. Too much horsepower in a rear-wheel-drive car with a manual transmission was probably not the most practical combination for all the snow they got out there. I still send him auction links whenever I see a nice 2001 or 2002 M5 come up for sale. Maybe one day I’ll convince him to buy another one. Or maybe I’ll finally buy one for myself…

After the soccer game and showing him around my E63, Robert and Callie followed us back to the house and visited for a few hours. It was so good to just sit around and catch up – kids, work, people we knew, things that happened a long time ago that somehow don’t seem like they happened all that long ago. That is one of the wonderful things about an old friend. The years between visits may get longer, but somehow the distance between you doesn’t necessarily grow with them.

And there are a lot of years behind us now. More than twenty. Twenty-two? Twenty-three?

The years seem to be getting thinner, too – come to think of it, so is the hair on top of my head. I have mostly accepted my fate and keep mine cut down with a half guard these days, with a skin fade around my neck. Robert, meanwhile, has developed this distinguished salt-and-pepper thing and looks considerably more debonair than I do. Some of us apparently handle aging better than others.

While we were sitting there talking, I stepped into my office and pulled an old photograph down from one of the bookshelves in there. It is a 3″x5″ picture of what appears to be most of the Mallet Assembly from 2002 or 2003 spread across the front steps and porch of the President’s Mansion on the campus in Tuscaloosa. Whether anyone actually gave us permission to do this, I have no clue. Knowing us then, probably not.

I asked Robert’s kids if they could find their daddy in the picture, which turned out to be harder than I expected. There are a whole lot of people crammed into that 3″x5″, and the faces are tiny, so I finally went and got a magnifying glass so they could actually see everybody. It is a big round magnifying glass with a black handle and little grey elephants printed along it. Momma gave it to me from Daddy’s desk after he died.

So there we were, using Daddy’s old magnifying glass to help Robert’s children study on more than twenty-year-old photograph searching for their daddy.

There he was. And there I was. Young. Very young. And with considerably more hair under my “tiny hat” (if you know…you know).

The President’s Mansion was quite literally in the front yard of Byrd Hall, where Mallet was located then, and looking at that photograph carried me right back to our little corner of Tuscaloosa where I spent the better part of four and a half years from August 2000 to December 2004. Byrd Hall, the President’s Mansion, the walk across campus to classes – and only a few blocks away, Canterbury Chapel.

When I went away to Alabama, Daddy made sure I knew where the Episcopal church was. Maybe we even found it when he took me over to visit before I made my final selection. Canterbury was only two or three blocks from Mallet, so most Sunday mornings when I was in town, I walked over for church. I won’t claim I was there every Sunday, but I was there most of them. College, right?

I usually went by myself. I don’t remember ever asking anybody to go with me, which seems a little strange when I think about it now. Maybe I assumed nobody wanted to come. Maybe I didn’t think anybody would. Perhaps they were all still asleep from whatever wild unsupervised night we just had, or perhaps they were still awake and winding down their evening as I was walking out the door in my khaki pants and polo shirt. Maybe I just wasn’t as confident in my own faith then. Apparently I wasn’t much of an evangelist in college.

There was an eclectic mix of people at Canterbury. My undergraduate advisor, who later became my boss for several years when I went to work for her as an assistant in my upperclassman years, attended there, and I saw her most Sundays when I went. She was almost certainly more diligent in her attendance than I was, and on her end she may have occasionally wondered why mine was a little inconsistent. But we never discussed church – that’s a little odd, right? Again – college.

But there was one particular spot in that little chapel that became mine: fourth pew from the back, all the way on the right side. There was a window beside me and one of the Stations of the Cross mounted on the brick column just to my right. I can still see it.

After my sister Rosie died in 2002, that particular pew became something more. I had been away from Tuscaloosa on my first engineering co-op rotation when she died, and when I returned to campus that summer, Canterbury felt different.

Or perhaps I did.

There is an old idea about “thin places” – places where there just doesn’t seem to be quite as much between here and there as there is in other places. Our priest in Augusta would often bring the thin place concept to bear in her sermons. To me, a thin place is really just somewhere you feel a little closer to the Lord, a little closer to heaven, a little closer to the other side.

That fourth pew from the back at Canterbury became a thin place for me.

I don’t know that I would have known to call it that then. I just knew how it felt to sit there. And looking at that old photograph Saturday morning made me wonder about it again.

If I went back to Canterbury today, walked into that little chapel and sat down in fourth pew from the back, all the way on the right side, beside that same window, with that same Station of the Cross on the column to my right, would I still feel the thinness of that place?

I don’t know, but I expect I would.

Maybe some places really are thin. Or maybe there are seasons in our lives when we are simply more aware of the distance between here and there – and maybe need that distance to feel a little smaller.

The night before Robert’s son’s soccer game, we had been sitting under the lights at the first Starr’s Mill high school football game of the season. The sun was setting behind the stadium, and we were swapping pictures of it back and forth with family. I have heard people say that football stadiums are their churches. I’m not sure I can quite get behind that, but I think I understand what they are trying to say.

Maybe there are places that, for whatever reason, allow the distance between where we are and somewhere else to feel a little smaller. A church. A football stadium. An old house. A familiar road. Maybe even the steps of the President’s Mansion.

Saturday morning, sitting in our family room with Robert and Callie while their children looked through Daddy’s old magnifying glass trying to find their daddy in that tiny photograph, more than twenty years didn’t seem quite as far away as they should have.

Neither did Tuscaloosa.

And neither did that fourth pew from the back.

I think the next time I’m in town for a ball game I need to go visit Canterbury and find out.