Everything Is Fine

 It's over. No more emergency. We're doing the recovery and assessment thing now and we have plans in place and arrangements made. Shit happened. We prevailed. Next!

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We got to relive some good memories unexpectedly while we were up  in Kendall when we ran into a woman from back when we were riding. She had been a bartender at the local Bandido bar, pretty much what you'd expect; a packer like I was, a cheerful hillbilly type lady who took no shit and started a lot, and laughed all the time and partied hard.

In the intervening years, she had gone on to get a Masters' degree in Special Education, and works with mentally challenged kids now! She also held the line and stayed in Kendall, which is a little slice of squalid meth hell in the pinewoods, and is a dedicated community volunteer - and there she was volunteering at the shelter!  

The thing about her that made this reunion so incredible is that she's the woman who stood by our dear friend, business partner and running buddy Albert Souk while he was dying.  

We did a lot of business together over the fifteen years we knew him, oddly all legal (I used to run his stall at the  swap meets and made him a big ol' pile of cash, while he went out doing his social butterfly thing, buying low and selling high.)  He had so much respect that he rode under the name his mother gave him, which believe me, is not something that happens a lot an almost never to people who aren't clubbed up.  We've got a million stories about this guy and all of them are as appalling as they are hysterically funny, but to get down to it, the man loved criminally insane women, and the last one tried to bludgeon him to death. While he had brain cancer.  It put him in hospice.

During all the insanity this woman literally stood guard over him and mustered the clans on his behalf.  She made sure that no part of the sideshow nonsense that was his wifes' family and their intrusions and outrages touched him by filling up the place with large men and women with intense attitudes. This was a high-end facility, and for a solid month the sidewalk out front was constantly lined with Harleys.  Everyone came out and represented and kept the peace in his honor. It looked scary walking up on, all those different clubs flying colors, and not all of them friends. But that happened, and this lady coordinated the whole thing.  And, without going into vivid details, because those details are just way over the top biker as fuck, she saw to it that he went out the way he wanted to go out.  Think of a Viking pre-battle feast, except one that went on for a whole month. That's kind of what it was like.

It took a little while for us to recognize each other because it's been a lot of years, but once we did she just brightened up our day.  She's still all country, all Bandito, and totally awesome.  We knew we were going to be OK while she was around. That vibe just spreads out from her.  It took our minds and got them right, and we got to hang out with someone from back in the day and reminisce about one of the most awesome people we've ever known and laugh.

I'm not going to put her name out there, but she deserves all the good vibes.  She's astounding.