Nineteen
so far as I know… that is deceased classmates who started kindergarten together
with me, or who joined us later in first grade or second, etc. Children I sat
beside and played with or at least observed on the playground and later in the
halls, gym class, and on the streets. We were communards, willing or not, and
even sixty years later we still recall and reflect on each other now and then,
whether or not we were close. And then there were the neighborhood kids. Less
likely to have been the same age, but enormously important in our younger, more
circumscribed and less mobile years
Cumulatively
to date I know of twenty-one such passings, and of these, five have resonated
especially for me. Which is what I want to write about.
Carson was
my very best and probably only kindergarten friend, as early on the teacher
sent a note home to my mother: “Stephen doesn’t play with the other children,
he just works out puzzles.” I must have improved, because I distinctly remember
he was my best friend at five years
old, though indeed I don’t remember any others. By the third grade we had
drifted, and I remember seeing him only two or three times after high school before he passed, roughly seven
years ago. Still, his remembrance deeply touched me, and I attended his
visitation. Given the little time we were friends and the near-sixty-year gap,
I was very surprised to have responded so. It must mean something.
The
next leaf to fall for me was Ed
Schlotterback. We shared a lot in common: long Saturday hikes, love of
nature and science, idiosyncratic personalities… and I remember having to stay
indoors one recess with Ed because we were the very last to learn a times-table
quick enough. Ed was one of a kind, and taught me how to cast molten lead into
plaster of Paris molds thereby producing shiny lead dimes (entirely
real-looking). Sadly his last years were tragic. This was my first experience
with the passing of a very good contemporary adult friend, and of course it
made a much deeper impression that I cannot articulate.
And
then Ben Hatton.. We never spoke a
word to each other in school, but became neighbors four years later. I had
recently married Kathy, and Ben and Susie Rosenberg lived together in the
next-door apartment beside the old Boy Scout Woods. And we shared beer!
Michelob!! Lots of it!!! On summer weekends, for just one summer. What
a tragedy that we couldn’t all have
met under such circumstances!. How many more friends we would all have to
treasure in life and to commemorate in death!! That friendship was short as both households soon moved on, such are the lusty early years that blow gale winds of
change, but it was a genuine friendship between people (Ben and I) who had
mistakenly assumed throughout four high school years that they did not like
each other.
Much
more recently (this past November), Phil
Wheeler passed. We were good friends from the get-go once the Catholic nuns
turned their progeny over to the public school for their last four years, and became very close after high school. Both of us with National Merit Scholarship
commendations, yet neither of us with degrees for several years beyond the norm,
not to mention other personality quirks; we were indeed outliers in Garrett. When I was
jailed in Auburn for ten weekends (DUI), I would walk to Phil’s downtown apartment
upon release Sunday evening and we would play chess until dawn. The deal was he
would feed me beer and drive me home if I would teach him to play better chess;
one of the few things I knew more about than he. Ultimately we both completed
degrees at Indiana University, Phil in physics and I in mathematics. But our
friendship was not based on learning or intellect. It was something else, something
so rare that I know no name for it. No doubt you too have shared the same kind
of ineffable bond with someone.
Finally,
Mike Zumbaugh passed, and I will be
going to his visitation Monday. His passing is especially poignant because he
was a neighborhood friend. In the hood. Relatively innocent, our
neighborhood wasn’t a ghetto, we didn’t shoot or knife anyone, just a
commonplace blue-collar Indiana working class railroad town with a significant influx
from Kentucky.
Of
course we did pile rocks to throw at the neighboring kids who were throwing rocks
at us, and we bloodied each other’s noses, and played army, and climbed trees.
And we listened to short wave radio, traded coins from our collections, shot
at birds with sling-shots, and chased fireflies. And we shared Archie and Batman and Superman comic
books, and looked at Playboy when one of us might have sneaked a copy from the
news stand or from an older brother. And we carved initials into trees, and played
basketball and dodge ball and volleyball and kickball and 99 kick the can, and watched
the moon with a telescope, and saw meteors, and invented all kind of games
and other activities that have no names
and that are utterly forgotten, except… Except in the thrill of remembering that old thrill that we
cannot name but cannot ever, ever, never ever forget!!
So
rest in peace Mike Zumbaugh and all the others… And You! If you have had or
have been a friend such as these five, it will never be forgotten, it is still
there in the Cosmic Soul, which Abides!!
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