Just boys

Honestly, I don't want to get disagreeable. I may be feeling this way, as if I'm on a track toward irascibility, given that Friday is my birthday. This bit of psychic depression graying the world may just be a temporary thing, a phase, a moment in time. Once I've passed it--my birthday, I mean--I'll be fit to live once again in the real world. It may just be a birthday--for me, 74th.

But I doubt it. It's more. 

Last week I lost a roommate. I may have lost others I don't know about, but this one was a relative and friend, my mother's first cousin, even though an entire generation separated the two of them. He was far closer to my age. 

In his youth he was a star athlete, a talented sprinter who once, almost entirely on his own, just about won the state track meet having taken first in two hurdle events, high and low. Oostburg High School lost that state meet by a half point.

He sort of got me my first job, let me know that the state park down by the lake needed help, the park where he'd worked the previous summer. It was a great job, even though, back then, it meant cleaning more pit toilets than any human being should in a single lifetime. You rarely did the same thing two days in a row, and the gang of workers were almost always outside, almost always on the beach or close. The tasks may have been disagreeable--raking up whole schools of dead ale-wives every other morning for a while--but the job never was. Everything was outdoors and on the lakeshore.

"Everything tastes better outside," the boss used to say when we ate the lunches we'd packed together. He was a Korean War vet with a big, jovial personality, a man who rarely got angry and loved to stay around after work for a cold beer from the ancient refrigerator in the office basement, generally confiscated Pabst Blue Ribbon or Schlitz or Kingsburys, the bounty we collected from underage drinkers hamming it up in the park. 

This friend of mine who died, he didn't really join in that festive hour after work. It wasn't his thing to slug down a cold beer or two before going home. It hadn't been mine either before I took that job, but I didn't stay away from that fridge in the basement and learned, thereby, to be a little less Dutch Reformed.

He asked me if I'd like to room with him when he returned and I went to college. He was a junior; I was a freshman. I was leaving a girlfriend, he was taking his with. If they weren't yet engaged, they were certainly on that flowery path. The two of us slept in the same room, but weren't in the same classes, nor did we find the same table in the commons. He attended chapel religiously. I did what I could to hide away.

I smoked a little, but then most everybody did. He didn't. Wouldn't. I remember hiding my Kents, kind of, in my desk drawer; but he wasn't my mother and never tried to be, only got testy about my conduct once, when an elaborate prank got out of hand and just about sent a innocent kid into shock. "Now you've gone too far," he said, a bit angrily. It's amazing that I remember those words. Not amazing, however, that those words suggest an assessment of my behavior that was growing throughout the semester. I don't remember his otherwise trying to discipline his trying roomie, but he must have thought about it--"Now you've gone too far."

He loved science. I was beginning a lifelong affair with literature and art. He was driven. I was a wanderer. He knew exactly where life's journey would take him. With every passing week, I was less sure about what I'd been told was Truth. It was the 1960s; I grew increasingly anti-war. He was consumed by his studies, his lab work, his girlfriend. To this day, I don't know how he escaped the draft.

For years, I'd seen him when we'd visit the town we both called home. He moved back. I didn't. But I'd see him in church--them, his wife and their growing family. He grew into a devoted environmentalist, turned his own property into a haven, a sanctuary, a woodland retreat. For many years he taught in the local Christian school and led discussions outside the classroom. He was a believer, sometimes a true believer. 

He became deeply committed about the evils of evolution, touted, in fact, a six-day creation, wrote letters and articles criticizing those followers of Jesus who were not as faithful or devoted. He came to the college where I taught (and we'd attended) to quiz the profs who would be his kids' teachers because he wanted to know where they stood with regards to Darwin. He was orthodox. Wanted to make sure Dordt College was safe. 

It was not difficult for me to assume, later in our lives, that he saw me as a kind of opponent, someone who didn't live by his strenuous orthodoxy. But we always spoke kindly to each other, just as we had while cleaning toilets and picking up dead fish so many years before. We were always friends and relatives. He and his wife and family were kind and generous with their hospitality.

As a boy, he'd lived out in the country, closer to the lake than I did. When I was old enough to pedal my way down to the beach, by chance we used to meet there, a mile south of "straight down," near the boat club, not far from where my mother sometimes picked up fish when I was just a little shaver. 

Fishing was done, and the lakeshore was a playground back then. Only a few of the homes that now line the beach were there, so on a gorgeous summer day we'd have most of that wild world to ourselves, no one chasing us away. I don't know that it happened often, but once when my friends and I happened to be down there, as he was, we found a fairly hefty piece of driftwood lined with protruding nails.

It was one of those few days when Lake Michigan water happened to be warm--there weren't many. We were kids, a year or two too young to bale hay. It was perfect weather to be down there, a long, long ways from the pointed steeple of the church we both attended in town. 

I don't know whose idea it was, but I'm tempted to say it must have been his because, at that time at least, I lived in his shadow--he was, after all, two years farther along on the road to becoming a man. He sprouted hair where could I only dream of. I was, at best, pudgy; he already had the fitness he never lost. It wouldn't have been my idea to lug that driftwood log out into the water the way we did, then strip down to nothing at all and tie the strings of our swimming suits to that floating barge. He was the leader of the pack.

That floating long boat meant we could skinny dip all afternoon without having to leave our suits on shore or worry about getting in and out.  And it was grand, as skinny dipping always is. It was a moment in time, maybe four or five boys suddenly and warmly conscious of a joyful sexuality we were only beginning to understand and, well, tolerate. 

His death last week reminded me of so much that was conjoined in our lives and what was not. We worked together, lived together, worshipped together, sang together, played ball together, and sometimes, down by the beach, played together. 

We were friends, just friends, and the world I live in is no longer quite the same now that he's gone. We weren't buddies, save for a day or two on Lake Michigan, somewhere around the Boat Club, when we spent most of the afternoon in the cool, breaking surf, our swimsuits tied securely to a raft that floated beside us. Just kids. Just boys.

Makes me smile, that memory does, and that's a good thing, this week especially. It's a good, good thing.