FOUR WHO TAUGHT ME FRIENDSHIP [Sat, 1-8-22]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

When you’re a child, you don’t really have friends; you have playmates.

When we moved to Indianapolis, I was four, and I had one playmate, Jimmy Mencin. Our relationship was only the convenient, across-the-street type. We would not have been playmates otherwise. I went to PS # 3 and East Park Methodist Church. He went to Catholic school and church. We would never even have met had we not lived across the street, and had there been any other boys our age on our block of N. Oakland Ave.

As I went up through the grades in school, I yearned for friends. I wasn’t exactly sure what made for a friend, but I knew it was more than being playmates.

Then we moved to the country outside of Oakland City, 120 miles south. [Yes, Oakland Ave to Oakland City; I thought it was an omen.] There I was put into a friends incubator—a school bus, where you have no choice. You have to relate to kids of all ages and genders and personalities. With good fortune, some become friends.

My intro to the school bus did not start well. My older sister and I had to walk about ¾ of a mile, on a narrow gravel road, with a couple of hills in it, to the wider gravel road, where we caught the bus. Mary V. was in high school, and pretty, so there were plenty of kids willing to share a seat with her. I was ten and backward, so I got the seat over the hole in the floor. [School bus standards were “different” then, meaning non-existent. Drivers owned their own buses, and not much inclined to spend money for maintenance.]

But there were other boys on the bus! Darrel and Donald Gene and Philip and David were already there when I got on. Don got on toward the end of the route. There was always a huddle going on about the relative talents of various baseball players and teams. It had been going on forever, and it continued for the 8 years I rode the bus. I assume it continues still. I was a Reds fan. The only one. The Cardinals and Cubs fans taunted me. But I didn’t care. I had friends! They could not leave me or avoid me, at least until the bus reached school, but I knew there would always be another chance to prove to them from the back of a baseball card that Johnny Wyrostek was better than Enos Slaughter of Andy Pafko.

Mike Dickey did not ride the bus, and he was not a baseball fan, but he told his mother about the new, poor kid in his fifth-grade class. She started sending her husband out to our farm to bring me into town to spend time with Mike, have lunch and talk and play tag. That friendship never wavered.

I was best man for Darrel--the alpha male, who always included his shy friend. He died from a brain injury suffered in a car accident. Shortly before he died, he told his wife, “I don’t know who you are, but I know you are the best thing that ever happened to me.” I was his best man, He was the first best thing that happened to me on that school bus.

I was best man for Don--the steady presence, the sober one who could be counted on but rarely laughed. Helen looked at the photo of Don they used for his obit, a big smile across his face, and said, “He looks just like you now!” He looked happy. That made me happy.

Donald Gene--the pleaser who always made me feel important--cited me as his best friend in his memoirs. He had a distinguished career as a navy pilot, but as he was dying, he felt that he had been swindled out of a lot of money by an investment counselor. He lived a continent away but often called me to talk about his unhappiness. I tried to please him by sharing memories from our childhood days.

Darrel and Don were in the class just ahead of me, and Donald Gene in the class just behind. Mike--the kid who was the real leader of our class even though he always claimed I was; we were the only presidents our class ever had--was the only one of my close friends from my own class, so I got to see him from time to time, at our every-five-years class reunions. When he died in 2015, I flew to AZ to do his funeral.

The four close friends of my childhood and teen years are dead now. As I think about them, I am fascinated by how each one fulfilled a different role in helping me to grow. I needed each one back then. I guess they needed me, too. I need them still, and they are still with me. As this new year starts, I give thanks for my new friends, and I give thanks for my old friends, who taught me how to be a friend.

John Robert McFarland