Friends

It has been said that old and dear friends take years to develop. While it may be true that friendships do deepen over time, some friendships are nearly instant and it seems that you have known each other your whole lives after only a short time.

One of those friendships for me started in 2010 when Lynn and I moved to Kalispell MT. After joining the local wood turning group I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Nickel. Bill was one of those people mentioned above. We hit it off right from the start and were soon great friends. Our love for wood working was deep as were many of the conversations we had over the 4 years we lived in the area.

Our ideas for projects ran the gauntlet from practical to sublime and all reaches between. We turned, or tried to turn many projects, made our own tools when the ones we had failed to meet our needs. We helped teach many teen agers at the local schools with demonstrations given by the local turning club. Found old lathes from some of Bill’s many friends and gave them out to the kids (both young of age and young of heart) so others could enjoy our love of turning, working with wood.

We used each other’s strengths to push our own limitations and create things that neither of us would have done otherwise. Most of those succeeded, some did not, but that’s how you learn, but not succeeding the first time.

 Bill was devoted to the community, doing volunteer firefighting for years, helping local library districts near his mountain home, heck, helping anyone that he thought needed help and would be thankful for the help.

It is also said that a dog is a great judge of character. If that is the case, Bill was of Great character. JJ loved that man! He could hear Bill’s pickup pull up outside our house and would start whining and wiggling at mach II. The only issue was that JJ is also a jumper, and due to his size, tends to jump on a person at precisely the Wrong height! It was a constant source of amusement to those of us watching, if not to Bill, when JJ would time Bill’s entry into our house perfectly to nearly bring him to his knees!

As you can probably tell from the tense of this story, Bill has been taken from us at far too young an age. A dear and great friend is no longer around. He is missed by all that knew him.

Good bye Bill, may we meet in another life, and be friends for many many more years the next time around.