When a Childhood Friend Dies

A guy I’ve known my entire life died. I didn’t know the adult he’d become as well as I knew the childhood we shared in the first seventeen summers of my life. But this will be the first Christmas when we don’t exchange Christmas cards. Neither one of us just send a card from a box with our names scribbled inside. He would fill every blank space on a hand selected Hallmark card with a memory of our years spent playing together at the cottages our folks both built and I would fill up a type-written Christmas letter. The kind some people make fun of getting and others seem to enjoy. 

My brother was a year old than Allen. I was two years younger and his sister is my junior by a year. I don’t remember any of us ever having a fight. We were too busy playing cowboy and Indian, building forts and digging sand pits. We swam, fished and canoed together. We walked nearly ever day a couple of miles either to a grocery store to get ice cream and Orange Crush or we’d packed a lunch and walk around the lake where at the time had no other cottages. Most nights we had a Monopoly or poker game going at his house where they had a huge table with chairs that came out of an old school and the number of players around that table sometimes was as high as ten but never below the four assorted cottage kids. The first 15-16 New Year's Eves and days of my life were spent with a sleepover at one of our parent's winter houses while they partied at the other.

When I got the text message that he had died, I was sitting in the car waiting to go inside to get my hair cut. So I had to buck it up and not let the tear or two flow down my cheek that threaten my composure. Selfish me, I wasn’t so much sad on his or his family's account as I was sad for the loss of a piece of my past. 

His family and mine kept the cottages in the families all these years since 1943 and whenever I visited my niece, who now owns the cottage of my youth, I’d walk down to see the siblings and nine times out of ten Allen would be there and we’d chat a little but as adults we didn’t have a lot in common. In my twenties I dated a friend of his for a year but we never talked about him or the fact that another friend of Allen's was the first boy I ever kissed or that the two of them once flashed their penises at me, his sister and a few other girls when they were 14 or 15. If laughing at a kid's penis could give him complex they would have had them because we girls laughed so hard I'm thinking there was a little pants peeing involved. 

Another great memory we shared involved five or six Holstein cows that got out of their field and I, Allen and our siblings ended up in a tree to get away from them. We were up there so long that Allen had to poop. Yup, he did it, hung his bare butt over the branch of the tree and dropped his "logs” down to the ground to the delight of the cows who all took turns smelling what fell from the sky. I thought we’d die up there in that tree but eventually, as all cows apparently do, they did go home at milking time. 

That tree is still there as well as the dairy farm and the cows. I’m no longer afraid of the cows---consider them my spirit animal--and I often stop when I’m out there to take their photos. They are so curious all you have to do is stand by the fence long enough they’ll come up to visit. I milked my first cow at that farm along side Allen. We shared a lot of firsts together. I saw my very first TV show with Allen and his sister and we learned to pick blueberries together.

One thing we never shared was a coming of age story and I guess I’m grateful for that because most coming of age stories involve a traumatic event like in the movie Stand By Me. Written by Stephen King, directed by Rob Reiner, you probably remember it’s a story of four boys who find a dead body along a railroad track and as in all coming of age stories it marked the lose of their childhood innocence. I was a late bloomer when it came to my own coming of age experience. I was in my mid-twenties and it involved the friend of Allen’s who I dated. It’s not that I hadn’t heard stories of the darker side of life by then, but hearing them and experiencing them first hand are two different balls of wax. 

The obituary for my childhood friend was very long and for the most part I knew everything in it except for one line about him being very happy when Trump beat Hillary. That had me scratching my head, wondering why in our current political climate would anyone put that in an obituary that will follow a person for centuries…assuming the world goes on for centuries and genealogy research is still a thing in the future. My niece thinks he wrote it himself and I'm guessing she's right. All these years we've been cancelling each other out at the polls. I'm not surprised, really. Our parents did as well and they'd managed to stay life-long friends.

Allen's not the first person in my age bracket to die, but we had known each other since my birth and now I'm down to just my brother who I can say that about. That's when you know you're really as old as you feel. ©

Dogs, Creamsicles, Cows and Snow---Oh My!

I started writing this post on Tuesday when it was a bright and beautiful day here in West Michigan. The temperature outside was twenty degrees but the sky was cloudless and the only snow in sight was hugging the shadows. I wrote about my ‘To Do List’---ya, I know as boring as watching beach pebbles mate. The first thing on my list was dropping the dog off at the groomers after walking him around the neighborhood to make sure his bladder and bowels were empty for his three hour stay. The second place I had to go was to the pet store to get Levi a 15 pound bag of kibble and enough peanut butter and apple treats to last him until his next grooming appointment in six weeks. After that I had planned to stop at Starbucks for a tomato and mozzarella sandwich and chestnut praline latte. But the line at Starbucks was impossibly long---or maybe I had an impossibly low tolerance for sitting in the car fifteen minutes just to get up to the speaker. Instead, I skipped to the next thing on my ‘To Do List’, a stop at a small grocery store that carries Reddi-Wip barista Sweet Foam. Everything in my life goes better when I can start my day off with a good cup of doctored coffee.

I also discovered that if you spray and stir the barista sweet foam into Orange Crush pop it tastes just like a creamsicle from ye olden days of my youth causing me to run out of the stuff sooner than usual. I may not be much of a cook but I gave myself an A+ for creativity in concocting that drink. It makes me feel eight-ten years old again when I was willing and able to walk a four mile round trip to a country store to get a creamsicle. Can you imagine letting little kids walk that far by themselves today without someone claiming you were a neglectful parent? We didn’t have cell phones back then, of course, or even landlines at the cottages and our mothers didn’t even have cars to come check on us if we didn’t come home at the expected time. In all the years my cottage friends and I made that daily trip to the store we only had two scary encounters. Once when a man tried to get us into his car and we ran into the woods like it never dawned on us that the woods was a good place to kill us and bury our bodies.

The other scary encounter involved five or six Holstein cows that got out of their field Me, Allen---a kid who I’ve known since birth---and our siblings ended up in a tree to get away from them. We were up there so long that Allen had to poop. Yup, he did it, hung his bare butt over the branch of the tree and dropped his "little logs” down to the ground to the delight of the cows who all took turns smelling what fell from the sky. I thought we’d die up there in that tree but eventually, as all cows apparently do, they did go home at milking time. So now you know the backstory on why I love my vintage De Laval advertising tin cows that are grazing on top of the doorway molding in my kitchen. Cows remind me of summer fun, of having to walk past them every day in the summer to go to the store for pop and ice cream. That scene on the corner near our lake with the barns, silos, pond and cows hasn’t changed since I was three years old. My niece owns the cottage now and when I visit and pass by that field of milk cows I can feel myself relax. Once in a while I’ll stop the car and walk up to the fence and sure enough there will be a few curious cows who will come to check me out and I tell them I knew their great-great-grandmothers.

Today as I write this I’m looking out at our first major snow fall of the year which I’m guessing is five inched deep and it’s still coming down. The dog is still sleeping and my driveway plower just left. I’ve had the same service for years but this year he took on a partner and the changes I see are going to be fun to watch. For one, they added a sidewalk service to their menu---Hurry! I’ve never minded shoveling snow but I shouldn’t be doing it with my bad elbow. And now all I have to do is shovel a path for Levi to get to his dog pen. And the new partner is sending out emails about each snow event. The first event wasn’t deep enough to plow but having a husband who was in the business for nearly three decades I thought it was clever of my service to let customers know about the behind the scenes activities like how many times and where they checked the depth of the snow around town that night looking for the 1 ½” trigger point to call his crew in to work. It never came. With today’s ‘snow email’ the excitement that all plowers get when the first big one hits of the season was almost palatable. And he wrote about how many dry runs they made of the routes before we even had snow in our forecasts to make sure their drivers knew their routes so no customer got missed and how they'd gone over their equipment several times to be sure it was all working correctly. The email brought back memories of my husband and I doing the same things. Memories that warmed my heart on this cold and beautiful winter day. ©

Cards, Cows and Another Year Under my Belt

Christmas has come and gone and not to brag but I got some nice comments written in cards that came in the mail. One of them said: “I really enjoy reading your Christmas letters. You have such a great sense of humor. I think you should have been a writer for a comedy show.” Instead of taking the compliment for what it was I thought about calling Allen on the phone and joking, “What’s with the SHOULD have been? I AM a comedy writer, I just have an exclusive audience limited to the names on my holiday card list.” 

Allen went on to say, “I always have great memories of the New Year’s Days we spent with your family. Your dad was so friendly, always a smile. I remember him doing magic tricks…” Yup, my dad was that guy who pulled quarters out from behind little ears and did magic tricks with cards to entertain himself and our friends. I tried to learn a few---and he was a patient teacher---but my sleight of hand moves were more like crawling up the rungs on a ladder. They got me where I needed to go but no one would mistake my moves for “smooth.” If there had been videos back then mine would have been labeled how-NOT to do False Cuts, Double Lifts and Pinky Breaks. My brother, on the other hand, did master the hide the quarter trick. I saw him do it with his two year old great-grand son recently. Not sure he’d fool anyone over ten years old but by that age if a kid knows how the trick is done they’re smart enough to keep quiet about it so they can keep collecting those quarters.

Allen’s mom and dad and mine were life-long friends and I can’t think of New Year’s without remembering the many sleep-overs he and his sister and me and my brother had together on New Year’s Eve when our folks and four of their friends would go off to another place for a house party or out on the town. Then they’d all gather in the morning where we kids stayed the night to cook a huge brunch before taking us kids to the roller rink for the afternoon. That tradition marked over a dozen New Year’s in my life. 

When I remember how close my folk’s circle of friends were I have to admit to being jealous. But it was a different era where people were less apt to move out of town, making it easier to nurture life-time friendships. They played cards every month for decades and took vacations together. Allen’s folks and mine also both had cottages on the same lake. Ohmygod, do I dare tell you about the time five or six Holstein cows got out of their field and Allen and I ended up in a tree to get away from them? We were up there so long that he had to poop. Yup, he did it, hung his bare butt over the branch of the tree and dropped his "little logs” down to the ground to the delight of the cows who all took turns smelling what fell from the sky. I thought we’d die up there in the tree but eventually as cows apparently all do, they did go home at milking time. 

So now you know the backstory on why I love my vintage De Laval advertising tin cows that are grazing on top of the doorway molding in my kitchen. For years I had to walk past a cow pasture on summer days to get to the grocery store where we spent our magic-trick quarters on ice cream cones and I was very brave so long as the cows were behind their electric fence. But after that day in the tree I swear the cows knew us and a few would come greet us and walk the length of the pasture with us from their side of the fence. In the animal kingdom when you’ve smelled another creature’s poop it means sometime and wouldn’t we all like to know that they were thinking. It probably went something like: “Hey, there’s that kid who eats Wheaties and bananas for breakfast and loves drinking our milk!” Allen ought to count his lucky stars that I didn’t become a comedy writer because I’ve got other stories about him I could exploit for cheap laughs. He was a supporting character in many of my childhood adventures.

Here I am with just New Year’s Eve left to get through in my fifth year of holidays as a widow. And I faired just fine. No ghosts in the house to haunt me with what-ifs, no bad flash-backs or pity parties. And I’m hoping to fill New Year’s Eve with good memories, a little sparkling cider, a few great movies and a small platter of party snacks that won’t make me fat---or fatter I should say, since on January second I start a take-no-prisoners diet that will have me begging for someone to put me out of my misery. ©

* Above - Pastoral Scene Cows Resting, painting by Janette Marvin. Below is my advertising tin cow collection. The three on the left are over a hundred years old. On their backsides they advertise cream separators for farms.