My friend George

The first time I met my friend George was when we assisted Kindergarten.

We always seemed to be the most unmatched couple of buddies that ever existed:

I was small, thin, used glasses thanks to early myopia, the proto example of a nerd when nerddom wasn’t cool.
He was cool, tall (always, even today, one head an a half taller than me), he was really fit, practiced boxing, went to the gym, did some weightlifting. He wasn’t the type of guy that could be bullied. In fact, one could think of him as the bully of the class.
But he has a heart of gold. He’s the best friend I’ve ever had.

Both of us considered each other as a soul brother.
We could spend hours talking about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Life put us on different roads when we were seventeen, I chose to leave Bolivia to live in Buenos Aires, he went to live in Germany.
We lost contact for 35 years.

In those years, I started to study mechanical engineering, got bored with it having 80% of the credits required to graduate, switched to robotics and that led me to computers and networks. I finally ended in Process Automation.

<p value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">I met my former wife in 1996, in what I call my hippie phase, when I worked as a self taught guide in Patagonia.I met my former wife in 1996, in what I call my hippie phase, when I worked as a self taught guide in Patagonia.

We got married in 2000, had two beautiful children whose factions conceal the exotic ethnic mix of their parents. They have native indian blood mixed with Moorish Spanish, from my side and a mix of Jew, Polish -German (Sudetenland), Irish an Netherlander blood from their mother. Our marriage ended last year, we had a beautiful time until it was not. Sometimes life just sucks.

He was George, so he couldn’t do things like everybody. He enlisted into the Bolivian Air Force, after watching Top Gun too many times. Always the defender of the weak, he knocked out a Air Force sargent that was bulling some freshman. That got him expelled from the military. With no clear plan for the future, he decided to travel to Europe and, once there, worked as a street musician playing a “charango”, sort of an ukelele made with the back of an armadilo. He actually coulnd’t play the instrument but pretended to do so until he mastered it.

He formed a band with a group of friends that played and performed typical andine music to tourists or inmigrant colectivities. I wonder what was the actual porcentage of real andine music they played when performing. He started to win some serious money performing and he employed those savings to study Industrial Engineering.

Then he worked in many beer producing companies. Being George, he got bored and started an operation of exotic woods exports, which turned out to be quite successful. He got outsmarted by some whitecollar criminals that made his company go broke. Anybody would give up after that, but George is not everybody. He started to work recycling old houses that he payed some hundred USD for and resold them getting quite wide margins. He developed an obsessive affair with Harleys, and women. If you are a Bolivian of around twenty something, don’t know your father and your mother can’t explain your size, then you are probably his son.

If I remember well, he got married several times, sometimes simultaneusly (he traveled to Germany frequently). If you are a German of twenty something, don’t know your father and your mother can’t explain your size and color skin, then you are probably his son. It’s obvius to say that he has an extense family.

We met by chance in February 2020 in La Paz, Bolivia. He was in the Airbnb business and doing quite well. Then came the Covid19 pandemic and now once again he’s strugling. But he is George, if anybody can rise up from a fall, it’s him.

We started talking like we were continuing a conversation that was interrupted yesterday, we told each other our life stories, it’s ups and downs, the happy times and the sad until dawn.

We are vastly different now from our teens, but somehow we still are soul brothers.

So let me introduce you to George (Jorge): my best friend ever: ( this is a four years old image, he still looks the same but with whiter hair).