A New Angel in Heaven

 

There is a new angel in heaven today.  He is big and bold, he has a terrific sense of humor, and he is one of my dearest friends.  Forty-five years ago, I returned from my Alaska/Guam adventure and one of the first things I did was join the Sierra Club.  Monthly meetings were held in an auditorium at the Raymond Walters Campus of the University of Cincinnati and that is where I first met Lynn Frock.  He and his wife, Pat, were very active members of the Group and of course at first, as I attended the meetings, I was a casual observer, checking out to see if I wanted to get involved.

But one day, I was in a small shop on Oakley Square when I happened to run into Pat and Lynn.  They recognized me, we started chatting…and that is how it got started, our magnificent friendship.  I guess the vibes between the three of us were just right, because the friendship launched immediately.  In part it was because Pat and Lynn recruited me into a more active role in the local Sierra Club.  But also, the friendship went beyond the Club.  In short order I was hanging out with them, house-sitting/dog sitting when they went out of town and just having a good time with them.

My very earliest memories of Lynn were getting into joke competitions with him.  Whenever, he, Drew Diehl and I were in the same room together the three of us would try to outdo each other with raunchy jokes.  Pat seemed to tolerate this interaction well and the three of us rolled with laughter. 

As the years passed, I saw Lynn in so many contexts.  He taught canoe school for the Club and was an avid canoer and kayaker.  He taught in the backpack school and he and Pat went out west almost every year for backpacking adventures in the Windriver Range.  They were devotees of cross-country skiing and made many trips to northern Michigan for the sport.  He was also very savvy when it came to politics and environmental issues.  As the years passed, we took on hiking the Buckeye Trail, never completing it, but I was proud of the 700+ miles we did complete.  And as always Lynn was a central figure in all those adventures and just a good, good man…one of the few. 

Later in life he developed a sever case of Type I Diabetes and eventually a form of dementia that began limiting our adventures.  Finally, in late November he fell, broke his hip, and as is typical for those situations, his health went straight downhill. He was moved to a rehab center in the middle of the pandemic and yesterday evening I received a call letting me know he had passed.

The world is a much lonelier place today.  He will be missed by so many whose lives he touched.  As for me, I’ll save my raunchy jokes for another day.  Farewell sweet man.