Old Friends

I opened an email the other day, surprised to hear from a person I hadn’t seen or talked to in more than forty years. The message was from my old friend John T, a person I had started the first grade with and had known through high school.

I remember John T in the first grade - I know, I’m old butnot senile just yet. Even at the age of five or six we were both mesmerized by cars. I remember manipulating a shrub growing in the schoolyard into a seat and stick-shift. We argued who would be the driver.

In the fifth grade, John and I were appointed SP’s - hall monitors. We wore white plastic belts that crossed over our shoulders and made us look like dorks. We had virtually no authority and the other kids simply laughed at us when we directed them to slow down, or issued any other inane order.

John and I lived about a mile apart. We both liked Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. John, like practically everyone else in Vivian, including myself, lived close to the railroad tracks. I was a geologist at heart even then. I remember walking the tracks with him once, looking for rocks. I was off the berm, he was on the tracks, walking towards me. A train was bearing down on him, its whistle blowing. I yelled at the top of my lungs but he didn’t seem to hear me. He disappeared from view and I had to watch the long freight train pass before I learned his fate.

I expected to see his body parts strewn on the tracks. Instead, he came smiling out of the underbrush on the other side, apparently happy that he had scared the hell out of me.

Our parents both had ’59 Chevy’s the exact same color of blue and white. In the days of muscle cars, both of our Chevy’s were grossly underpowered; my parent’s station wagon was a small V-8, John’s parent’s an anemic six cylinder. There was a patch of gravel on the street beside my house. John loved to stop there and floor it, the sensation of slinging a few rocks his only answer to not being able to burn rubber. My parent’s car was no better.

John left for Louisiana Tech in Ruston after graduation. I went to Northeast in Monroe. I saw him briefly in 1968 when I was working in New Orleans for the summer, but not since. I haven’t, in fact, seen or heard from him until the recent email note.

Well, it’s good to reconnect. Old friends are your best friends but sometimes you never realize as much until you are as old as I.

Eric'sWeb