Goodbye; or, For Todd

This week a cloud has hung gloomily over me, ever since I found out that a former neighbor died last Saturday. He wasn't quite the boy-next-door; he was the boy a few houses down and across the street.

My parents moved to our house on Allen Circle when I was 5 years old. Across the street, a few years later, a family with 4 beautiful boys moved in. In addition to each being absolutely handsome, the boys all displayed freakishly good athletic abilities, and soon decided (without consulting us first) that our yard would make the best football field in the subdivision. Soon kids from all over the neighborhood came and played ball in our yard, which I have to admit was kind of perfect. The yard had no trees save the two spruce trees that stood like bookends to the flat expanse of grass---instant goal posts! A straight brick sidewalk perfectly bisected the yard---a 50 yard line! The little landscaping at that time consisted of mostly juniper bushes under my sister and my windows. 

I should also mention that my parents didn't really approve of the kids playing in our yard. Nobody ever asked permission; it's like one day a gang of boys showed up and it was decided from then on that our yard was the community football field. The kids would do things like knock over flowers or leave the water running after they helped themselves to a drink, creating a mud pit. They were rough, too, on each other as well as the yard---of course, this was the 70s and early 80s, before people worried about parents suing for their kid breaking a leg on your property. 

My younger sister and I spent many a day peeking from behind our curtains and over the junipers at the boys playing football. Having just each other as siblings, boys were a foreign species in our house. We studied the mysterious older boys as anthropologists would, watched their moves, eavesdropped on their conversations, and when that got boring, took opportunities to harass them. Sometimes they'd take a break and leave their shoes on our porch, so we'd squish juniper berries in the toes. If they actually noticed, it didn't deter them from coming back. 

Those original football boys eventually grew up and/or moved away. The night before I graduated high school, one of the across the street boys was killed in a car crash. Unbelievably, a few years later, another brother died in a car accident. 

The football tradition was carried on for several years, until one middle school kid showed up drunk and almost aspirated in our front yard, and that was it. Dad and Mom (who ended up taking Puke Boy to the ER) put the kibosh on the games. No more football in our yard. 

Flash forward, many years later. My parents still live on Allen Circle, but most of the families I knew while growing up are gone. Hurricane Katrina took out one spruce, and the other died. My parents ripped up the sidewalk and put considerable time and money into nicely landscaping the yard. The hideous juniper bushes are gone. I still look out the window and think fondly of the boys who played ball, and I get a lump in my throat every time I think about the loss of 2 of the 4 neighbor boys. Then, a few years ago, one of the guys contacted me online---a neighbor Todd, one of the original team, who moved when I was still a geeky, awkward middle schooler and whom I had only seen a few times since their departure from our little town. 

Facebook is a weird thing. It's where the superficial flourishes. It doesn't matter if you hardly know someone; anyone can request to be your "friend," even if they didn't say three words to you growing up. This was different. Instead of that thing people do after a lifetime apart---basically run down your résumé of where you've lived and what you've done---we told each other childhood stories. Funny stories. They started with my family's football field and went from there. The one constant was they all were about things that happened on our little street, and most contained at least a cameo from Tim, the second brother who died. Tim was handsome, smart, and absolutely witty and hilarious. Girls were in love with him. Guys wanted to be his friend. He had that impact on people. Todd and I traded funny childhood stories, and that was the extent of our online "friendship." But in a lot of ways, it was huge. 

It was important to me because it wasn't about how I got contacts and put on some much needed weight and didn't end up as homely as expected, or how I had my heart broken by both so-called friends and boys in our little town, or how I still manage to be somewhat of a geek, but not in a so-sad, pitiful way. It wasn't about reminiscing about high school and college and other experiences we missed out on in each other's life. It was a nice slice of my childhood that he was there for, and few other people can say that. We spoke the language of the kids who grew up in my neighborhood in the 70s and 80s---the Mini Mart, the Icee store, names of people long gone, of swimming holes and creeks. We shared a collective memory and told each other new stories about that time and place that was, to me, much better than trying to impress each other with our lives today. 

Last Saturday Todd suddenly passed away. In light of the world of "friends" and facebook, do I call him my true friend? We hadn't seen each other in over 20 years, and I didn't even know what he did for a living until I read his obituary. But I re-read the chat texts from the last 2 years---late night musings about football games, and who fought whom in the neighbor's yard (now my grandmother's yard), and who talked his daddy into going fishing (without him). Tim, naturally, was a part of these and the rest of the better stories. We talked about grandparents we have lost and how they made us who we are. Ironically, our first conversation was about how we loved our little town that we both had moved away from and never planned on moving back to so much, we both wished to have our ashes scattered in Lawrence County water (him=Cooper's Creek, me=Pearl River). For bringing me back to that time and place, he is definitely a friend. For the loss of someone who was an amazing storyteller, and from all accounts, a great friend to those who have known him since middle school, I feel a huge loss, much more for those folks and his family than for myself. It's also one of those times I have to face the inevitability of being mortal. He was only 45 years old. 

But it doesn't mean it didn't hit me. Hard. 

When I'm back in my town, I will do that thing I always do---I'll wistfully stare out at my parent's front yard and daydream of the boys who played ball and entertained my sister and me so many years ago. And Todd has now joined the league of boys who are no longer on this Earth, and I'll look at his house and feel the loss for those stories we never got around to sharing.