On Long Ago(s) and Far Away(s) - Part 1

So once upon a time I was eight years old.

And on the very same day that they handed out those little pills that you could chew on and it would make your teeth and gums red where there was plaque, a photographer came and took the picture reproduced below of my third grade class in Panama City, Florida. There was a fair amount of plaque in my mouth that day, but as you can see if you can figure out which kid is me which you ought to be able to from these clues, I was not in the least bit embarrassed about it.

At least I wasn't embarrassed about it until we all got our copies of this picture back a few weeks after it was taken.

But this isn't a post about my noticeably deficient oral hygiene during the fall of 1980. Although my oral hygiene is certainly noticeably deficient. And although this picture was taken during the fall of 1980.

This is a post about grade school best friends. And my best friend from when my family lived in Panama City is in this picture. He was in my class. His name is Billy. I loved him. We did all kinds of stuff together, my memory tells me. We went fishing. We rode our bikes around. We chased our dogs. We read books. We went around the neighborhood in the morning on trash day and scavenged for treasures. My family's house was on the edge of this swamp with homemade dirt biking trails and puddles and woods and less than a mile from the runway of some local airport and we were eight year old boys.

There was always something to do.

But we moved to Iowa during the summer between fifth grade and sixth grade. And Billy and I lost touch.

Now fast forward to last week, more than twenty-five years later -- just skip right past the invention of Google even though it's a darn important part of the story. I was talking to my four year old daughter and she was asking me to tell her about when I was a little boy. She was asking me, bless her adorable little heart, how I met my friends back when I was a little boy. I have no idea how it came up.

Well, I remembered Billy's name, looked him up on the Google scraper that I use (that way Google doesn't get my cookies), immediately found a website about him and sent him an email. He answered my daughter's question -- How do you meet people when you're under 10? -- with what must be the truth:

"You just do, I guess. It's before
you have any reasons not to."

Thus began a glorious email exchange of wonderful reunioning which I hope and trust will continue here in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. And all of which prompted me to dig around in my old photos to find not only the above class picture but also the image of triumph reproduced below.


This image captures perfectly my best friend Billy the conqueror in the hours immediately after he subdued a true monster of the deep - a largemouth bass weighing in excess of one pound (seriously).

And, to my amusement, it looks like I'm wearing the same shirt in both pictures.