From the time I was old enough to remember anything to until after I graduated from high school, my family lived on Austin Drive, a small road in a small town in a small state. There were five houses on that tenth-of-a-mile span, including ours. When we were young, the house next door got new inhabitants every year or so, and two of the others were occupied by what we kids referred to as “old people,” which is to say doddering individuals who were probably about the same age I am now.
The one Austin Drive house besides ours in which I spent any time was Raymond’s. He and I were born in the same year. Each of us had a younger brother and an even younger sister, collected baseball cards, loved riding bikes and played basketball on a hoop erected years before on the street by a community-minded neighbor. Each of us excelled at hide and seek, possibly because it involved two additional shared interests: eluding irritating younger siblings and scrambling up and down trees. For nearly a decade’s worth of school years, the two of us waited together for the bus each morning, along with a half-dozen or so other neighborhood kids, in front of the fire hydrant at the corner of Austin Drive, Virginia Terrace and Austin Drive Extension.
As Ray and I got older, our paths diverged. I immersed myself in sports; his passion was music. But thanks to each of us having surnames near the end of the alphabet, we reported to the same homeroom for four years in high school, and periodically chit-chatted amicably there.
I can’t recall the last time I saw Ray. I didn’t spend a lot of time in our hometown after leaving to simultaneously pursue higher education and put off adulthood, and he probably didn’t either. By the time I returned briefly after college, what was left of our family lived elsewhere in town. My by-then adult sister saw Ray by chance in New York City some years later and reported that he seemed like a pretty nice guy, a conclusion I found both reassuring and unsurprising.
Not seeing a childhood playmate for decades because of relocation(s) to somewhere far away is ordinary and understandable. However, knowing for a fact you’ll never encounter one another again ”“ ever ”“ is a bit more difficult to grasp.
Ray died in 2013. He’s the fifth of my boyhood chums to pass on prematurely; Kurt was even funnier and smarter than he was vertically challenged. David loved laughing, music and motorcycles. Andrew was even more kind than he was brilliant, accomplished and handsome. Russ was a modest, sharing role model leader, team player and pillar of our hometown. He’d have been a pillar of any other community, too.
There were no more than 50 boys in our eighth-grade class. That nearly 10 percent of the males my age who grew up in an environment free of toxic waste dumps, crack houses or similar life-shortening risk factors have expired before living six decades is more than a bit disquieting.
This “end of year” reflection was supposed to recall and mourn notable people who died in 2013, like Nelson Mandela, C. Everett Koop, Ed Koch, Jonathan Winters, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Stan Musial, Marcia Wallace, Helen Thomas, Scott Carpenter, Pauline “Dear Abby” Phillips, Chinua Achebe, Joe Weider, Annette Funicello, Pat Summerall, Ken Norton, Jean Stapleton, Van Cliburn, Frank Lautenberg, Margaret Thatcher, Emile Griffith, David Frost, Andy Granatelli, and other nationally or internationally-renowned individuals.
It was also intended, to a lesser extent, as a salute to recently departed athletic stars to whom I looked up as a youth, including Tom Boerwinkle, Deacon Jones, Bill Sharman, Zelmo Beaty, George Sauer, Art Donovan, L.C. Greenwood and Toni Linhart, as well as to men whose faces appeared on the cardboard squares that I, Ray, and millions of others like us collected as kids. Those include Chuck Hinton, Gates Brown, Grady Hatton, George Scott, Gus Triandos, Earl Weaver, Enzo Hernandez, Fred Whitfield, Fred Talbot, Rick Camp, Bob Chance, Earl Williams, Dan Osinski, Virgil Trucks, Lou Brissie, Andy Pafko, Bob Turley, George Witt, Tony Pierce, Paul Blair, Jim Cosman, Ed Bouchee, Mike Hegan and Johnny Logan. They all died in 2013 as well.
But sober reflection morphed it from a garden-variety collective eulogy for the celebrated into a tribute to genuine impact-makers like Kurt, David, Andrew, Russ and Ray. Living, breathing human beings have a responsibility to take advantage of the opportunities their departed peers no longer have. The people who truly matter in life aren’t those whose fame, accomplishments and media omnipresence let us imagine what they’re like. They’re average, exceptional, regular, unusual, ordinary, extraordinary individuals with whom we personally share experiences, meaningful and/or seemingly unremarkable, every day.
— Andy Young’s New Year’s resolution for 2014 is to treat everyone he encounters with the kindness he’d like to be treated with. His fondest hope for the foreseeable future is to be bereft of opportunities to eulogize any more boyhood chums in print for at least another couple of decades.
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