My mother ran into an old family friend while out shopping today. She told me all about it when she got back, and I was surprised to feel a pang of envy. These are old, old, old family friends. We used to go to the same stuffy old church for what felt like a million years when I was younger. Every week - a Friday or Saturday night, I can't remember - several families from church would gather at their house in Downey, and the parents would do a bible study while we, the kids, ran wild through the sprawling house. There were five of us little ones. My brother, being five years older than me, was the outlier. The rest of us were relatively close in age. I was the closest to the boy my age - our mothers went way back, talked for hours on the phone with each other, and were virtually peas in a pod. We were raised almost side by side. There's a picture of us as babies in our little chairs next to each other, milk bottles in hand. We became known as "drinking buddies."
Together, we dreamed up brilliant journeys, fighting our ways through dungeons dark and deep, monsters both hideous and marvelous. Our last stand would always be at his parents' minibar located right smack in the family room. We'd snap the swinging door shut and crouch down, breathing heavily as we imagined the room shake, the walls tremble as our greatest foe approached us in the dark.
With a roar, we'd rise up together, cap guns in hand, shooting madly at the furious monster as it reared far above us. We'd stand triumphant on top of the bar, shouting in victory until our parents came to snatch us down from our dizzying heights and remind us not to split our heads open.
We'd laugh, and the moment they left, the lights dimmed again, and we could feel the cold walls of the sewer closing in around us, an eerie drip of water the tell-tale sign of a monster that lurked in the shadows.
When I was in the second grade, an immense scandal erupted at our church, and our little family of families scattered. I was thrust into a completely alien world of Hawaiian-shirted, flip-flop-wearing church-goers. The familiarity of these strangers was frightening, and I missed the constant presence of my best friend, who called me his honorary cousin.
We grew older and apart, seeing each other only at Christmas and maybe once or twice during the summer. We'd greet each other shyly after these long absences, but then the moment I jabbed him in the ribs, he'd giggle back, and I knew that we'd be on our way to more adventures.
Things started to change, though. I sailed by in school, effortlessly reading several years beyond my grade level while he struggled with his dyslexia in a school that treated him as if he were an alien. He became more withdrawn, and I overcompensated, becoming loud and boisterous to fill the silence that suddenly vanquished the monsters and turned on the lights, all the adventure dead and gone.
One Christmas, divorce tore apart our little family of families, and from then on, the visits grew fewer and fewer, and less reason there was to make the half-hour drive.
And so it went.
There was a massive six-year gap in communication between the two of us. We entered middle school. We finished middle school. We started high school. I hardly remembered who he was.
Some news still trickled through the cracks in the brick wall time had built, and I learned that he had become an incredible tennis player, shooting up several feet to rival his father's six-foot-plus frame. He'd won numerous awards in the sciences. He'd even written his own computer program. He bought his first car, a battered, old stick-shift, with his own money. We still got Christmas letters from all the families, little laminated photographs with red and green backdrops. My mother still put them up on the mantelpiece.
During my sophomore year, I was just finishing up a night race with my cross country team when, impossibly, I heard a familiar voice calling me from the stands. Turns out my little drinking buddy had joined his school's cross country team to pile on some conditioning for tennis season. I hardly reached his shoulder now as he bent over to receive my awkward, sweaty hug. I caught up with his mother, who was vaguely disappointed that my mother wasn't in attendance, and we talked for a while across the chain link fence about what had happened in our lives. It was so odd. Of all the places we should meet again, it would be on a dimly-lit track hours from either of our homes in the middle of the night. I didn't realize how much I actually missed them up until that point.
We saw each other again sporadically at other large meets. I'd always slip away from my team to go look for the maroon and gold of his school's canopy, and I'd always be disappointed if I didn't see it. When I did find him, I realized that time had made us cautious, too cautious, of falling back together into the familiar rhythm our childhood, and our exchanges were short and stilted.
I haven't seen them for over a year now, but my mother's chance encounter with them (at a Kohl's of all places) just reminded me of how close we used to be. He's going off to college next week to study computer engineering and won't be coming home for several months at a time. We're all growing up, grown up, growing away.
But he will always be the boy that helped me conquer my fear of water in his parents' pool, diving up and down the deep end, splashing me impishly as I sat shivering on the edge. He will always be the boy that taught me what a shish kabob was, during those long, hot barbecues we had together. He will always be the boy that introduced me to Star Wars and the power of The Force. He will always be the boy that I'd tickle to the point of tears - both his and mine.
Those were the days of Nerf wars and magnetic darts and living room handball with yoga balls. They're over now, but they'll never be gone.
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