FRIENDS AND THEN SOME

My oldest friend came to visit. We missed our 50th high school class reunion while he was here. But I miss all high school reunions; he went only to the 40th. None is enough for me, one must have been enough for him. What's left of the old class can re-une all they want. We were happy here in New Mexico.

We have been friends for more than 60 years and met the day I became the new kid in Miss Martinelli's combined second-third grade class at Sternberger Elementary School. That's where I ended up because my parents wouldn't allow the school to jump me directly to third grade. I sometimes wonder how it might have changed my life to make the jump, but I ended up in the half-and-half class instead, second graders on Miss Matinelli's left, third graders on her right. Only the brightest second graders ended up in that class; I am not sure how the third graders qualified to be there. It was halfway through the school year when I arrived and the only thing my new classmates knew how to do that I didn't was cursive handwriting. That was for third graders back in the school I came from. Otherwise I'd done most of the reading and arithmetic at my old school. 

Miss Martinelli said penmanship was important in life and I had to learn. Immediately. My mother assured her I would. We called it writing in longhand and I'd practice every afternoon making line after line of looping letters on wide-ruled paper. Big letters and little letters. Working my way through the alphabet and back, A-Z and Z-A. It was tedious, pencil-dulling work and I hated it, but I had to show it to my mother every day before I could go out and play with my new friend.

Then my aunts showed me how to fasten three pencils together with rubber bands so I could create three parallel lines of letters at a time. Three fat pencils angled just so, one rubber band. My mother's younger sisters were identical twins who had conspired to find an easy way to do anything and everything their whole lives. They began by charming their father then worked up from there. They were in their 20s when they showed me the pencil trick. Eventually the easy way out would become more and more difficult to find and they both became alcoholics. But their pencil trick made my life easier. I finished my handwriting homework in one-third the time and was given permission to go out and play with my best friend who lived up the road. My aunts winked as I walked out the door. We were co-conspirators and children love conspiracies more than handwriting.

My best friend's name is Durwood and we were friends at first sight. Same class, same school bus, same stop near the end of the school bus line at the edge of town. We were about one stop away from attending the county schools with the farmers' kids, but our parents would never have allowed it. We weren't country people. Our fathers had jobs in the city. We went to city schools and would have even better jobs in the city someday too. At least that was the plan. Eisenhower was president. What could go wrong? Life was good and could only get better.

Of course, times changed and people changed and the plans of the 1950s went awry in the 1960s and we went awry along with them. But before all that happened we had four years of freedom and friendship there at the edge of town: a pond to fish in, woods and fields for walking, a whole field full of rocks to throw. We learned to play chess and shared a love of Pogo comics. We lined up with everyone else for our polio shots. His house burned down while he was away at Scout camp. I watched it burn. His parents built a new one, ranch style, brick. I envied the fire and the new house. Sometimes when we slept over at his house or mine we were allowed to stay up late and watch Jack Parr. We were like brothers. Some people thought we were brothers

Then in the summer after sixth grade my family moved further into town. Durwood and I were no longer neighbors, but we always attended the same schools. We sang in a boys choir, played music in the school band. We bought identical Gibson LGO acoustic guitars. I had a guitar but he had the talent to go with it and eventually he learned to play far better than I ever would. He still came to my house, I went to his. Not as often, but often enough. Our friendship held fast.

After graduating from high school in 1963, both of us spent years climbing around in the wreckage of the 1950s, clung to adolescence through the 1960s and finally reached some semblance of adulthood sometime in the 1970s when we were nearly 30 years old. He became a banjo player, I became a writer. He once introduced me to his boss by telling her, "We tried to grow up together but didn't." His boss was country singer Loretta Lynn and we were on her tour bus somewhere in Iowa at the time. Durwood and I both laughed, but I am not sure she got the joke. Later he became a computer whiz and I became an executive. Through it all both of us remained boys who grew up just shy of the city limits, city boys with country longings.

As adults we've never lived in the same place and there are times we didn't see each other for years. But we have been friends since the day we met on the school bus and got off at the same stop in 1953. Now we have both retired to houses stuck on mountainsides, his in Tennessee, mine in New Mexico. My aunts are dead. My handwriting is strangely left-leaning (I am right handed), awkward and to this day I prefer to print when I have to write something down. I suppose I sacrificed penmanship to friendship but I have no regrets.

He is back home in Tennessee now and wrote today to say how much he enjoyed our time together. I wrote back, " The pleasure of your company is one of the truest pleasures of my life." What else could I say?