My Old Friend, R P

https://imgur.com/a/c2vPq

Kevin Raus, R P Majors, Me, Vin (my brother). I met R P Majors when he was a neighbor of my sister Nancy and my brother-in-law Kevin around 1979 or 1980. R P hit on me immediately. He said "Are you with child?" Confused and irritated, I thought "Do I look pregnant or something?" Then he said "Would you like to be?", which made me laugh. I was always a sucker for someone with a quirky sense of humor. We hit it off and started dating. A better description of our early relationship would have been that we "loosely associated". We didn't ask a lot of questions or make many demands, and we both were seeing other people. We would dip in and out of the relationship and each others lives- days or weeks or longer together and then days and weeks or longer apart- a pattern that continued for many years with occasional exceptions. At this time, I rode a bike because I didn't know how to drive a car. R P rode a bike because he just liked riding bikes. Soon enough, R P met the rest of my large famliy and then were all riding bikes together. R P owned a business called "Texas Trees". He had a Volkswagon pick up truck and a one ton International truck that he used to haul tree trash, but he often rode his bicycle to a job site. He would load his bicycle with his chain- and other saws, some special spiked ankle binders and a strap (or belt) that he used to shimmy up the trunks of tall pine trees, and other equipment. That 'spike and strap' tree climbing was a sight unto itself! I swore that R P was part squirrel the way he would shimmy up a tree. The wealthy ladies in some of the better neighborhoods of Houston absolutely loved R P because he was never in a hurry and would often spend quite a bit of time chatting them up and generally shooting the breeze with them while working on their trees. R P was very small for a guy. One of the ladies he did tree work for said to me "When I saw that littly-bitty man get out of that great big truck, I just laughed and laughed!" I loved that he was my size! He also did beautiful work. There is an art and a science to trimming trees and it was something he was very good at. R P particlarly loved oak and pecan trees and would take me around to visit his favorite trees in the area, of which there were many. He (and we) planted a few trees, too. I still see them around town today and they still remind me of him. His favorite tree was a huge, ancient oak at a Houston area cemetary. We biked here to visit this tree pretty regulalry.

Favorite Tree: a Live Oak, estimated to be 250-300 years old. This tree is about 20 feet in circumference and the branch spread is about 120 feet.