What follows in this post is a story about growing up in Collinwood, a neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. These stories, unlike my other posts, may contain situations that are inappropriate for work and will almost certainly contain vulgar language. There won’t be anything completely explicit, such as detailed descriptions of intimate acts. Even so, some of these might only be borderline workplace safe and you may want to wait until you get home before clicking the More button.
Has it been ten years?
Walt visited a few weeks ago for a funeral. In our twenties, we would probably have met because he was in town for a wedding. In our thirties, we’ve rounded the corner and I’m sure it will be more funerals than weddings from here onward.
Four of the five guys that made up our high school clique met for dinner: me, Walt, Bill and Chaz.
We spent the dinner talking about the things that are necessary for a conversation to become a reunion: weddings, funerals, children, houses, jobs. As we rolled through the topics, I looked at the men sitting with me and thought about how much had changed in the last decade. Walt is married, which was inconceivable until it was true. Bill has a new sense of seriousness that I knew had been developing but was clear as we old friends met. Chaz had always been quiet, but there has been an introspective distance present ever since he finished his Ph.D.
Implied by all this is the unanswered question: how have I changed?
What I did last summer
After the tables were cleared and I was home, I thought about the first time I experienced ‘catching up’ on things. It was with Walt, at the end of the summer after high school graduation.
That summer, Walt went to boot camp. I took early coursework at college. He spent a summer on a painfully hot island learning nine different ways to kill in silence. I spent a summer in a chilly, windowless computer lab learning how to program in Pascal.
At the end of the summer, we each had a break between the prelude and the substance of the way we’d each spend the next four years. I offered to pick him up, which his parents appreciated as an alternative to packing their car full of children and herding them through an airport to find Walt.
There’s something about airports that emphasizes how our life of ’stability’ is unstable. From the people managing their luggage, impersonal uniforms directing activity, teary eyed parting and teary eyed reunions are examples of the illusion of things being a constant rather than always in flux.
Airports also are symbols of anonymity and small-ness. The mass of strangers that you need to wade through to get from airplane to entrance put our small life in perspective as people in all kinds of clothing with all kinds of demeanors mix. Suddenly, instead of seeing homogenous groups of people who have self-selected to be peers, we see the range of humanity and realize how we are just one variation in an infinite set.
Sitting in the terminal waiting for Walt’s flight to arrive in the late 1980’s, I started to feel these things for the first time. Then the airplane landed, the door opened, Walt walked off the plane and it was all suddenly clarified in my mind.
The reason for this sudden insight was that Walt didn’t walk off the airplane. Walt had left Cleveland with long 80’s metal-hair in black jeans, a black t-shirt, motorcycle boots. He slouched and still had some baby fat from drinking two liters of RC Cola every day. The Walt who stepped off the plane had zero percent body fat, was wearing a uniform, and was walking tall with a duffel over his shoulder.
Things had changed.
In one moment, it was clear that things would never be the same. In just three months, Walt and I, best friends in high school, had departed down different paths. The things we had in common in May were separated by three months of computer code and bayonets. More accurately, they were separated by what three months of computer code and bayonets do to the way each person thinks about the world.
However, to step outside of this train of thought, I didn’t start writing this to record my thoughts about reunions, time passing, airports as a symbol of separation or other things of that nature. I started writing this because the reunion with Walt reminded me of picking him up from the airport, and that reminded me of what happened in the week that followed…
And now, a Collinwood Story…
We collected Walt’s baggage, walked out to the car in the late-summer heat, and started the drive across the city.
As we did, Walt grinned. It was the same grin I’d seen countless times in the prior four years. It was a grin that meant trouble.
“I’ve got a present for you.” He said as he started to rummage in his duffel.
He pulled something out of the bag. I looked over.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!?”
He grinned again as he held a grenade in his palm, as if it was a baseball.
(continued next week)
2 Comments
Well done,very nice. I think you’re close to hitting your stride,so to speak, it captures that moment perfectly. I get this feeling you more than the rest of us are where you need to be,or want to be.
Granted my views will be somewhat slanted,(as this is a Walt story), but that’s not what I am talking about. You have your voice,and are articulating it,and it rings true..not to mention flows well,and that’s what I mean via the complements. In the short time,compared to the ten years of the web site, that you have been writing the Collinwood stories your writing has grown quite a bit and it shows.
Now as far as people changing,what I noticed is bill and chaz,as well as you and me continued on our journeys,along the paths we walked. I saw how much we hadn’t changed,as well as how much we had…..in fact of all of us Bill changed the most,you and I at least outwardly,(demenor,etc.) had stayed kind of the same,wheras as you said Chaz had become withdrawn…but we all during the dinner played the same roles we used to play except for Chaz,whom seemed like he wasn’t there at all.
Yet that still fit. You were still the speaker,the distiller of the many ideas,the diplomat, the one with a hand,or foot in all directions,(as you search for meaning), Bill was the stolid base in reality,the baseline,the one that kept,at times, all of us from doing stupid things, and Chaz ever the dreamer was even more so..though it seemed either he chose not to speak or he was to far into the dreaming,(kind of like an abiriginoal Austrailian). Me well I was me, I was the semi-loud boisturous one in the group, the one who kept up the conversation. Call me passion,call chaz dream,call you thought,call bill reality….and if looked at like that……none of us have really changed as much as we have stayed the same.
I’m sure glad to read the Collinwood stories again!