Have you ever been surprised by running into or getting a blind call from an old friend? Do you remember how excited and happy you were getting caught up? Friends give our lives meaning, context, and warmth. They help define the stages of our lives. They can be an oasis of stability and refuge in both trying and exceptional times.
We are social creatures. Whether introverted or extroverted, we need the occasional or long-term friends and friendships to share and navigate our lives. Whether quantity or quality, our friends activate, energize, and memorialize our lives. They are worth having, remembering, and treasuring at all life’s stages.
To help you recall and value your friendships, I’m recalling and sharing some of my friendships and experiences at different life stages in this four-part series of stories. I hope it triggers your memories and experiences that will renew and enrich your lives now and whenever you need that warmth and comfort. I further hope it reinforces or reignites your realization that community life and its success throughout life is vital to our role in humanizing ourselves and our social environment.
In each of the next few weeks, I will take you through four cycles of my life. I’m calling them:
In the ‘Hood – Childhood Years
Where Are the Girls – Teen Years
The Pro Years – Working Adult Years
On the Back of an Elephant – Retirement Years
In the Hood – Childhood Years
We all know our early years of socializing and learning in our families and through our play experiences with friends shape us and how we encounter life. I was lucky to have a loving and supporting family and a stable neighborhood of friends to help guide me. Not all family and friend experiences and encounters are positive. But we learn from both the positive and negative.
I live in Tampa, Florida. I’m 75 years old, and my life has been both as unique and ordinary as most all others. It’s had its ups and downs.
I live on a broad boulevard that winds and parallels a bay shoreline. I’m in a small second-floor condo facing the water. From my balcony, I can see the hospital where I was born, the downtown where I spent my career, and a sidewalk and seawall where I’ve walked, biked, run, and driven during different years of my life. Yet, for all my close-to-home living, I’ve visited and toured on every continent except Antarctica. I’ve driven across the US twice and up and down it more than I can remember. I’ve visited most of the states, most of the big cities, and many small ones. I’ve cruised across the Atlantic once and the Pacific twice. And I did it all with friends and some family. And that’s the point. You can be a hometown native, a world traveler, or everything else. Where you live and where you go, there are friends and friendships. Some you take with you. Some you meet along the way.
I live about a mile or two from where I grew up and went to school through high school. I went to a Catholic K-8 elementary school, ninth grade at a Catholic high school, and 10-12 grades in a public high school.
In the neighborhood I grew up in, across the street, next door, or within a couple of houses from where I lived, there were at least 12 boys my age or a year or two from me. All but three went to my Catholic school. The school was about six blocks away, without any especially busy streets along the way. Within a year of when I could ride a bike, I biked back and forth to school. The neighborhood moms rotated carpooling on cold or rainy days.
The parents of the other boys in the neighborhood and mine socialized together. They even coordinated what gifts we got for Christmas so we all would be included in the games, toys, and play equipment the others had.
We all were in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts together, and all of us who were Catholic were also altar boys. We hung out together for Halloween and couldn’t wait to show off what we got for Christmas.
Within only a block or so of where we all lived, many acres of woods ran all the way to a bay. You had to wade across a shallow drainage ditch to get to it, but we called it “the creek.” Our neighborhood was mainly built just before and after WWII, and almost all of us had big yards with big trees or vacant lots. We all had, with the help of the dads, wooden forts, tree houses, and bag swings you could ride from platforms built in the trees, and a lot of the big trees were very climbable.
We each had BB guns, fishing gear, tents, frog gigs, machetes, jungle hammocks, giant sandboxes, swings, see-saws, climbing bars we called “monkey bars,” bikes, kick-balls, and most everything else a young boy could use to occupy himself and his friends. We didn’t have TV or high-tech amenities. In the summertime and on weekends, in the early years, we would show up at each other’s bedroom windows, climb out, and head out on “adventures” until sundown. Sometimes, we made PB&J (peanut butter and jelly for the uninitiated) sandwiches and took them with us. I don’t remember any of us getting into any serious trouble.
We went fishing, camping, bike-riding, “hunting” across the “creek”, and crabbing together. We killed, skinned, and mounted on planks the skins of poisonous snakes. I learned how to throw a cast net or use a seining net along a shoreline to catch bait for fishing. We acquired the rare row boat on one fishing adventure, and three of us went into the bay fishing. Fortunately, most fish are found close to shore in grassy bay bottoms because a sudden thunderstorm popped up, and we escaped to a nearby sandbar, flipped the boat over us, and rode out the lightning and rain. When it stopped, one boy found a quick way to land where he could run to the marina and a phone to let everyone know we were safe. When he returned, and we got the boat back to the marina, our parents and workers were waiting to greet us. You’d think we’d been lost at sea. I was mostly embarrassed, but I thought we had comported well under the circumstances. I never found out exactly what my other friend told his parents and the marina, but they seemed relieved. It's good to be missed and worried about.
As teens, we built and graduated to homemade, lawnmower-powered go-carts. Some got motorbikes, but those were rare. Later, we had cars or access to them. But until after high school, there was little need for cars except for something really special.
Today, six of us still live locally: one is in New York City, one is in Georgia, two are in North Carolina, another is in Jacksonville, and the last is deceased. We all went to one of two high schools. Three of us went to the University of Florida together, and two of us were fraternity brothers, but other colleges are represented.
Only last month, out of the blue, someone found me on Facebook, and we spent several days exchanging messages and catching up. We continue to communicate.
I have crossed paths since childhood with all but three of them at reunions, funerals, church functions, social events, or just happenstance. They are all fine men, and I highly value my friendships with them, the many skills I learned, and the thousands of fun experiences we had together.
Learning how to be a friend starts in childhood and making memories with childhood friends.
This story was originally published on April 7, 2022.
12142023A1/4
im4u.world's mission is to give you the tools to change the world.
Please share this story with your friends, family, and co-workers.
A vibrant online community for people who yearn to make a difference in the world.
Coming in 2024.
Comments