It’s hard to see a close companion struggle with their life.

After our best neighbor and I graduated school, we still stayed close but we chose bizarre paths.

I went to a liberal arts college to learn psychology while he immediately entered the workforce. While I struggled to keep up our core GPA amid social turmoil on campus, he was floating from 1 job to the next because of truly awful job conditions. He hated all of his jobs so badly. This led him to apply to trade school and focus on studying heating, cooling, and ventilation installations. To our surprise, he landed a high paying position right after he completed his heating and cooling education. He started as an apprentice worker to 1 of the masters that has already been with the company for years. Now after years of experience, our beloved neighbor is taking on his own apprentice whenever he goes out on HVAC upgrade and repair calls. As most would assume, I use him as our heating and cooling worker all year round. I wouldn’t ever dare calling someone else to fix or repair our air conditioner. And I sincerely appreciate that like all air conditioner repairmen, he’s trained to fix and repair oil furnaces as well. I definitely have a boiler in our basement that supplies hot water to all of the rooms in our house which needs attention. Whenever our neighbor is doing service on our air conditioner, he inspects our large boiler and makes any necessary repairs if something is going wrong with the device.
Space heater