Roger Hood and I started on opposite sides of some strong opinions and really got into it. He questioned some of my statements about my sons driving our funny cars to which harsh words were exchanged and unkindness was unnecessarily provoked. There seemed no way out of the fight which was so unsettling to me, so I asked his forgiveness and offered my friendship. Then, despite these many strong words, Hip went on CIFCA's old website and was able to confirm my statements and he PMed me with an apology. We spoke quite often from that point in regular e-mail as well as on the old Mater and I grew to appreciate his deep rooted knowledge of drag racing history as well as his intense love for the sport. We shared a great deal of our personal lives with each other and we remained fairly close to the end. He shared his medical issues in confidence and I assured him that he would be in our prayers as he finished up this mortal session of the bigger existence picture. His experience at Indy was a finishing touch on his life and, as so often happens, one soul touched so very many.
When my mortal session is over, there are lots of wonderful people I am very excited to meet including so many family members, notable world leaders, religious reformers, founding fathers, inventors/great thinkers and so many others but I can assure you, I'll look up 'ol Roger "Hip" Hood for a wonderful reunion of two friends. We'll even get to watch the races in HD Real Time without waiting for the finish of the "tournament of champions" hopscotch finals.
I'll never again discount the possibility of using kindness to turn an adversary into a good friend. Everyone's worth that effort.
