You Don’t Always Have To Be There To Be There

LaRenda Bradfield called to tell me our 60th high school reunion is going to be in late September. I pondered on that for half a second. Late September is three months away! That might be too long for some of us….

I get a little nervous when the young lady at Hunt’s Seafood Restaurant tells me it’s going to be a 40-minute wait for a table. I don’t buy green bananas. I get the half gallon carton of milk. I don’t look at the Farmer’s Almanac to find out when the next full moon is going to be…I’m only interested in how dark it might get tonight.

You get old enough to have a 60-year reunion in anything, you’ve got to consider some possibilities of life that never occurred to you when you were 13, or 21, or even 46. I was fixing to tell LaRenda that we might ought to move this celebration up to the day after tomorrow when she asked if I knew how to get in touch with Ricky Hale.

Well, no, actually, I did not.

And that is a shame. There was a time when we were inseparable. He would make the long walk out to our house to play kick the can. Or we’d hustle down to the big ditch and see if we could find a grape vine big enough to swing across. If we could get Joe and Richard Gooch, George Sexton, David Mark, Kong King, and one of the Williams boys, a baseball game would break out in that field between our house and Aunt Jessie’s.

Ricky was the luckiest guy I’ve ever known. He hit a tremendous drive one afternoon that was headed right for Mrs. Boaz’s bedroom window. She was a nice enough neighbor but baseball and kids were not her cup of tea. The ball was still in midair when I got to thinking Daddy would whip us all if that window breaks….

The ball hit dead center on the small wooden frame in the middle of the window and bounced all the way back to the walnut tree between the Boaz house and ours. It was a one in a million shot. Nothing was broken! I started breathing again as Kong ran up and retrieved it (We only had one ball.) and the game went on.

I would spend the night during the summers with Rick because they had a TV. Miss Anita would let us carry our Cheerios into the living room and we’d lay on the floor and watch “Captain Kangaroo.” I’m telling you, life with Richard Lynn Hale was always pretty good.

As we got a little older, we’d meet uptown at Woodrow Kennon’s Store. If either of us had a nickel, we’d buy a Root Beer and take turns drinking it down. One Saturday morning he found a quarter in front of the Park Theatre. We had a Pepsi a piece. And two packs of Tom’s Peanuts to pour down the necks. That’s living life about as large as it gets.

We got bicycles the same Christmas. You talk about the world opening us for us! We took clothes pins and stuck baseball cards to our spokes so it would sound like a motor running as we sped past the swimming pool. We’d coast “hands free” down that big hill where Forrest Avenue ran into Main Street. And argue over who “chickened out” and hit their brakes first.

Girls showed up out of nowhere in junior high. Charlotte Melton wouldn’t come right out and say she liked me. She wanted to know how I felt first. She asked her cousin Pam, to ask their cousin Ricky, to ask me what I thought.

Rick was a bit red faced before he could get it all out. I was stunned. Charlotte’s dad was rougher than a stucco bathtub. I wouldn’t want to upset his daughter. Ricky was supposed to get an answer….

It was the first time in our lives we couldn’t think of nothing to say to each other.

Rick was double dog lucky. His dad ran a service station down in Trezevant. He was into cars, engines, motorcycles, and such. Not long after the girlfriend episode, Mr. Arvie bought Ricky a brand-new Moped bike.

We rode the wheels off that thing! And liked to have gotten ourselves killed a time or two. If it hadn’t a’been for Ricky’s abiding luck, there is no telling how we would have ended up. Naturally, after we turned sixteen, he was the first to get an automobile. We’d cruise around Frank’s Dairy Bar looking like we knew more than we actually did.

I’ve not seen Ricky since we graduated. He is not big on reunions. But I can tell you, not many days go by that I don’t think of something he said, or we did. Life separated us, but it didn’t erase those wonderful memories.

And, you know what, with Rick’s luck, he will make it to late September.

I may not hang on that long, but the mere mention of his name has already kicked off the reunion for me….

Respectfully,
Kes