When my friend and colleague Rick Edmonds died after a traffic accident, I began to think about all the things I had learned from him: about the news business, about crafting clear sentences, about raising daughters. Rick and I were good friends, but not close friends. Close friends share meals and have phone calls, sometimes late ones. They help each other solve personal problems. Rick and I did none of that. We were contemporaries. Born a year apart. Graduated from college a year apart. Married a year apart, in unions that would last more than a half century. Over the last decade, we found ourselves sharing space in the Poynter library — his desk near mine, without the privacy of a door. We named our special space the Assisted Living Wing of the Poynter Institute. Our proximity invited countless interesting conversations, building blocks of friendship. About 20 years ago, Rick became my golf coach. He was quite the athlete in his youth — tennis, squash, baseball.…