Years and years ago

When I went to high school in Wyoming I dated a lot.  I didn't go steady but just went on a lot of dates with different boys.  When I entered BYU I think I imagined that I would follow the same pattern until I met "the one" and then we'd fall madly in love, he'd go on a mission while I waited for him, and then we would get married, have lots of kids and live happily ever after. 
I had that mindset when I joined the Cougar Marching Band my freshman year.  All those cute guys, most of them LDS (not the case in the middle of Wyoming), and except for the ones with wedding bands it seemed like just literally rows and rows of guys to date.  I remember looking at the guys who played the drums and saying to myself, "I think I'll date the drum squad." 
I almost did.  I dated both bass drummers, one snare drummer and the drum major during the next two years.  They were my friends and I had fun going places with each of them - movies, dances, picnics, whatever. I even celebrated with some of them when they got their mission calls. The snare drummer?  That was Neal and I fell hard for him.  We dated a lot for two years but it was a challenging relationship.  According to Neal (long after we were married) I terrified him back in that era and his way of coping was to give me a hard time. 
One of the bass drummers was Neal's good friend from high school (BY High in Provo) and John and I spent a lot of time together, but his was also the shoulder I cried on whenever Neal had upset me.  He even took me to a formal dance when Neal accepted an invitation from some girl who was in ROTC with him.  John was always there for me, made me laugh when I was discouraged, and I was excited for him when he received his mission call.
Fast forward to July 7 1978 and the Salt Lake Temple.  My youngest brother was getting married that day and as I sat in the wedding guest waiting room, I noticed a girl who looked familiar.  It was John's little sister and she recognized me.  She told John who was sitting nearby and we had a warm but quick reunion.  We were both married, we both had families, I was teaching school in Montana and he was athletic director at Weber.  That's about all the information we had time to share before our groups left for separate weddings.
Some time after that John left Weber, moved to California and ran into Neal.  While they were catching up on their lives, my name came up in the conversation and Neal asked John if he had ever heard from me.  So John told him that he'd seen me in the SL temple, that I lived in Springville, was married to a bishop and had six children.  Um, what?
Moving forward to 1997 I was divorced and living in Montana.  Neal was recovering from a miserable marriage, not happy in his situation and began thinking of the good old days...and me.  He just wanted to call and talk to a friend so he tried to find me by looking through the Springville directory (looking for listings with husband and wife displayed as - ___ and Joan) with no luck.  Of course not!  I was in Montana raising my two daughters.  His next move was to call BYU Alumni and see if he could locate me through their office.  BYU Alumni does not give out information that way, but just by coincidence (!) the person who answered the phone had a surname that Neal recognized and was related to one of Neal's high school classmates.  They chatted about the family and the person in the alumni office said, "I'm not supposed to give out this information but since I know who you are I'll tell you this much.  Her last name is Larsen and she lives in Billings Montana." 
That's all it took for Neal to find and call me.  It was a Saturday morning in February 1997 and as soon as I heard his voice I knew who he was, even though he told me that he was my brother Phillip.  For the record I don't have a brother named Phillip but Neal frequently used that name years before when he left messages for me.  I have no idea why he did it but I thought it was cute.
After Neal and I were married we talked about John and decided to see if we could find him and let him know that we finally had married.  He was supposed to be somewhere in California but all we learned was that he had left the university and had gone to work for a radio station.  We hunted diligently for quite some time but had no success.  In 2003 we went to Neal's all-school reunion where we learned that John had passed away.  That explained why we couldn't find him.
I'm quite sure that one of the people who met Neal when he went Home was his friend John.