He was the quiet one who left a loud impression upon my life.

Following his recent death, Bruce Taylor leaves a legacy of love to his family and friends all the way from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to Virginia to South Carolina and to Florida where his genuine kindness drew people toward him like bees to honey.

I met Bruce in junior high school in Piscataway, New Jersey, when we were both in the eighth grade. He appeared at first to be unassuming to best describe him. In a room full of people, Bruce was the Invisible Man, someone you might not even notice was there. That was until he became the Magnetic Man as you were drawn to the nature of his gentle presence and his intuitive interest in who you were and what you had to say.

We became good friends and passed the hours of our teenaged years going to rock concerts and listening to the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steppenwolf, Led Zeppelin, and Three Dog Night blasting from Bruce’s record player in his closet sized bedroom. He and I loved the outdoors. We rode our bikes to fish any pond we could find or to catch trout in the South Branch of the Raritan River once we got old enough to drive. He drove a red Pontiac GTO that got us from here to there as if the car had been shot off a rocket pad.

When at legal age, on a given Saturday night, we tapped kegs of beer for his live band dance parties he held in his basement. Before Bruce graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University, I was invited there for a classic dormitory party that was close to what you saw in the movie, “Animal House,” five years before the film was made - a rollicking beer drinking fraternity fracas.

After high school and college, adult life leaves childhood memories behind and sometimes, best of friends with it. Careers and marriages moved us apart. Bruce left for the South while I stayed in the North and we saw each other only once as many years passed, but that was no matter to our friendship. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to each other” and he was right. Out of sight never meant out of mind for Bruce and me. We often shared our experiences as Facebook friends.

When I was told he was seriously ill, I called him and from his hospital bed, he was delighted to hear from me. We had a good talk about everything and nothing. His voice, although cracking from the disease and from the medical treatments, was the same I had remembered when we were in high school. Gentle and thoughtful were his words. Perhaps he had known all along that this ordeal was a battle he was not going to win. After the call, I had a feeling that he was prepared to accept whatever was going to happen.

Bruce had his fair share of tragedies. He grew up without a biological father present in his life and a stepfather who died in a terrible explosion that left his stepbrother scarred from third degree burns. He had lived through the death of his sweet mother, who prepared snacks for us and our friends during our frequent poker games in his kitchen. Bruce never once played the victim, the “woe is me,” excuse for not grabbing the gusto that the joy of living was to offer him.

Thoreau wrote, “When it is time to die, let us not discover that we had never lived.” Bruce lived an enriching life, full of laughter and full of love. Memories will forever warm the hearts of those who had the good fortune to know him.

If he could speak to us from “the other side,” I could hear him recite the words of a Henry Scott’s poem that encapsulates the joyous life of this man I had known for 60 years.

“Death is nothing at all.

It does not count.

I have only slipped away into the next room.

Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was.

I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.

Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name, speak of me in the easy way which you always used and put no difference into your tone.

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.

Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was.

There is absolute and unbroken continuity.

What is this death but a negligible accident?

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near

just round the corner.

All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.

One brief moment and all will be as it was before.

How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

I’ve said many times before that as we age, loved ones will die before us, but they live on in our hearts and in our minds.

Bruce was then and is now my friend forever.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com