FRIday, JANUARY 17, 2003

When the road bends back briefly

 

When I was 13, back in the far-off days of the 1960s, I had three friends.

I actually had a few more than that, but it was three kids - two boys and a girl - that I met when I started high school in the fall of '63 who have been on my mind lately.

Their names were Jim, Andy and Terri.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mike, is this going to be another one of those columns where you change the names slightly but use the same first initials in a ridiculous attempt to disguise your friends' identities?

Sure. It always works when I refer to my friend "Mitch," doesn't it?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Uh, yeah. Carry on then.

Anyway, Jim, Andy, Terri and I met in ninth grade English class, and somewhere between "Great Expectations" and "The Merchant of Venice," we became friends. Jim was a fairly normal kid, Andy and Terri were both extremely bright and I was the most emotionally needy 13-year-old you could possibly imagine.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Exactly how needy were you, Mike?

What is this, the freaking "Tonight" show? I was so needy I made Sally Field ("You like me, you really, really like me") look positively stoic.

EDITOR'S NOTE: That's very needy.

Exactly my point, "Mitch." Now if I may proceed without further interruption ...

My memories of 1963 aren't as vivid as they once were. I remember sitting in Earth Science class on a Friday afternoon in late November when the principal came on the public address system and told us that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas.

Kennedy was actually already dead when we got that first announcement, but it was 20 minutes before the principal - all I remember is that he was a stocky guy named Phipps with a military brush cut - came on again to tell us the rest of the story.

I seem to recall Andy only being at our school the one year. I'm pretty sure Jim and I both had crushes on Terri, but the one she seemed to have a real connection with was Andy. He was a bright kid with a literary bent even then. He was the only kid who wrote something that year that I still remember, 40 years later.

Our teacher asked us to write limericks, staying away from those of the "young man from Nantucket" variety. Most of us struggled and stumbled through the five-line format; Andy played with it.

He wrote of a "young man from Oet, who wanted to be a poet." I've forgotten his third and fourth lines, but the conclusion cracked everyone up. "He couldn't make the last line rhyme with the preceding context."

I guess I should have known even then he would wind up with a Ph.D. in English, publish both fiction and non-fiction books and have a career as a professor at a prestigious Eastern university.

He married Terri, too, although it didn't last. When she told me recently that she and Andy had eloped at age 20 and had been married for 10 years before divorcing, it didn't surprise me a bit. It also didn't surprise me that he turned out to be a major intellectual.

She told me he was the only person she ever knew who read James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" -- and understood it. When I heard that, it made me feel like a character in a Jeff Foxworthy monologue.

"You might be a redneck if ... you didn't even understand the title of 'Finnegan's Wake,' or didn't even know who Finnegan was."

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mike, that pseudo-lowbrow persona of yours is so trite. You're married to a woman who has two doctorates and is a real intellectual, and your daughter just graduated from UCLA with honors.

And your point is?

EDITOR'S NOTE: You can't be as stupid as you claim to be, or Nicole would have kicked you out a long time ago.

You must mean "Natalie," "Mitch." Remember we're using fake names. Besides, I have other good qualities.

Anyway, I won't mention the titles of Andy's books, except to say that even the titles made my head hurt. He's leading an academic life in one of those Eastern cities where if you're from out of town, it's tough to get directions.

Excuse me, sir. Can you tell me how to get to Radio City Music Hall or should I just go (bleep) myself?"

That's why I love living in the West. I remember my friend Mike Wilbon of the Washington Post (his real name and newspaper) writing about a power outage when he was in a Denver hotel in 1987. He said he knew he was west of the Mississippi River when no one asking the desk clerk when the power would be back on threatened to kill him.

Andy was the only one of us who wound up in the East, although Jim had a career in the military and now lives with his wife and children in the Tidewater area of Virginia.

Terri lives in the Northwest. She's a lawyer for a large corporation, which is one of the last things I would have guessed she would turn out to be, even if she does describe herself as "an aging hippie in a business suit."

She always reminded me of the female lead in the overlooked 1981 film, "Four Friends." Georgia was a free spirit who believed she was the reincarnation of Isadora Duncan, and while there isn't much I remember fondly about my high-school years, I do remember Terri.

She was never my girlfriend. I never kissed her or even held her hand, but she was the first real female friend I ever had. And even though I tend to agree with Billy Crystal's assessment in "When Harry Met Sally" that eventually guys with female friends develop a sexual interest in them, that's not how I remember Terri.

She was a military brat who rebelled intellectually against being pigeonholed or restricted, a good-looking girl who never seemed to know - or care - how pretty she was.

Terri's dad got a new posting after 11th grade, and she moved away in the summer of 1966. I never saw her again, even though I later learned she spent her first two years of college at a girls school I used to visit from time to time when I was attending the University of Virginia.

If life is a journey, as so many people have said, it's rare that the road doubles back and lets us see how friends we've lost along the way turned out. To some extent, the Internet has changed that, with Websites and Google searches making locating old friends sometimes just a click away.

I know I can't return to 1963, or even to last week, but sometimes when I leave Ontario in the late afternoon and head into the setting sun toward my home, I find myself wondering what 1963 would have been like if I were the person I am now.

Certainly I would have been more confident. Maybe I would even have kissed Terri or found myself at a younger age. I do know one thing.

I'd have found out a lot more about this guy Finnegan.