Garnett Vance, Jr.

I had quite a shock a few days ago.  My boss passed away very unexpectedly.  He had leukemia and had been ill for some weeks, but no one knew with what.

So I have not felt much like posting.  I'm going to miss him ever so much...
But I would like to tell a couple of stories about Garnett, so that you can all get a feel for what kind of person he was.
The first one involves food.  Yes, Garnett must have been a purebred corgi in a previous life.  He loved food.  Really, though, he was quite chubby as a child and young man and I forget what he told me he weighed in grade school but it was significant.  He was a fat kid.  He decided to do something about it when he acquired the name "Husky" for the jeans his mom bought for him.  And while I knew him, he was slender and in very good physical shape.
So he would come into my office and if my lunch was sitting on the desk, he'd open it and go through it, inspecting it. Every day.  At first I was sort of horrified, I mean, that brown paper bag could contain ANYTHING, after all, it's a plain brown paper bag, right?  :)  But he would ask me what kind of sandwich it was and then go merrily on his way down the hall.  It cracked me up.  I finally told Janie, another employee, that she had to come and check my lunch every day because I missed him doing it. And then nearly cried when she came in and did so one day.  :)

Another funny story, Garnett had bought something like $400 worth of country ham.  (I will save the explanation of what country ham is, exactly, for another posting.)  This was right before Christmas and he had them in the back of his pick up truck.  He went around town to deliver them to friends and business acquaintances.  He stopped at the first place and took the ham in, visited for a short spell, and then came back out to his truck. Which was filled with stray cats.  He told me there had to be 30 cats in that truck.  Worse, they had gotten into the ham.  Not one ham, but ALL of them.  They had clawed and damaged every single ham.  He came back to work with a pickup full of messed up ham.  I thought he would be angry.  No, Garnett was almost always pleasant to be around and he shrugged and laughed and said "What are you gonna do?  They were hungry and I left the back of the truck open."  I don't know if he went and got more ham but suspect that he did. And the poor man had to be deathly ill by then, with only a couple of weeks left in his life.
But he smiled and made jokes and although we all noticed he was  a bit cranky now and then, and knew he was sick with "something", we had no idea that his life on Earth was approaching his transition to a better world.
Garnett was a great boss and a friend and he cared about all of us.
God bless you, Garnett, and keep you in His care. I know we will see you again some day.  And I miss you so very much....