Thirty years is such an incredibly long time that Victor Hugo could have filled almost a whole chapter with it. In thirty years nations rise, necklines plummet and light can travel ¼ well ¼ thirty light years. You get the idea.

In 1972 I stood with Dan Huff on a dock in Mayport, Florida, watching our old destroyer sail away to Europe. In 2002 Dan and his wife Sandy knocked on the door of room 11 at the Sea Scape motel in Indialantic, Florida. I had been preparing for this face-to-face for weeks, but the last two hours had changed everything. An expected meeting quickly became a surprise, as fate blindsided us with a sad twist.

I remembered some things Dan had forgotten as we reminisced, and he reminded me of some other things. He reminded me I had already met his wife, Sandy, back in that amazing summer three decades before. There the three of us sat on a sofa in Beach Studio Apartments, as the picture from his old album pulled us back through time.

In another picture, four young sailors, looking kind of like hippies in their civilian clothes, stood below a sign on the outside wall of the apartment. The "i" and "o" had suspiciously vanished from the word "studio," leaving an appellation above the young men that, from this long later vantage point was hard to deny: "Beach Stud Apartments." In the summer of 1972, Dave Betts, Wes Watt, Dan Huff and Johnnie Cox had spread themselves pretty thin.

Summers are long in Florida, and that one hadn't ended until December. The USS Power had been home since 1968, beach apartments aside, and we watched it sail away. And the ship wasn't just one place, it was the whole world: Da Nang, Subic Bay, Hong Kong, Sasebo, Brisbane, Recife, Dakar, Luanda, Karachi, Cochin, Mombassa, and San Juan. We watched all those places we'd shared together sail away, and an hour later we shook hands and parted company for a very long time.

When the door opened, I knew I'd have recognized him on any street in any town in the country. Gray hair instead of black, a few more pounds, but it was Dan. I had to explain where my wife was, and we looked out the motel window to see her pacing back and forth on A1A.

Around 9:30 that Sunday morning, Delphine lifted a basket of clothes, and I reached over to open the door of the room. By the time we noticed Socks was outside, it was too late. We called to him, he stopped and looked back but ran around the motel faster than we could. We looked for him all morning in culverts, under cars, in the laundry room and across A1A in a mangrove thicket where Delphine flushed out a homeless man. Later Dan and Sandy even drove us around to post flyers for Socks.

Dan was still Dan. Maybe I should say Dan was still Barf. In our fraternity of sailors where everyone was obliged to wear a nickname and where all nicknames had to be vaguely derogatory, he had been Barf and I had been Wally. Seeing and listening to him, the voice and mannerisms were the same. He leaned forward and backward in the chair as he talked, sometimes even reaching down to touch his shoes quickly, nervously. Dan spoke like a marionette: the words were good, the gestures were good, but the one didn't always connect with the other.

In a few minutes, we went outside, and I introduced Delphine. Dan and Sandy expressed sympathy, and Delphine seemed OK for going out to lunch. Dan drove to the Olive Garden in Melbourne, and later we went to Sandy's sister's house in Melbourne Beach. They were fun to talk to and we had a good time, forgetting about Socks for a while.

Things happen to us at random, but that doesn't make them insignificant. I think Shakespeare's Macbeth was wrong. On the same day I was reunited with a friend gone missing for thirty years, I lost another little friend, who had brightened the last five. Life is unpredictable. It isn't orderly. And when it isn't harder than we can stand, it's often better than we deserve. Life is not a tale told by an idiot; it is a story in which the plot peaks every day.