Regardless of the
title, the story to be is really a short story about friendship. We have
perhaps only a few genuine friends in a lifetime, for myself, I can count them
on two hands, and if I scratch the old one out, maybe one. In my old age, I can
say I got a few more than I expected: Apolinario M., or perhaps Sister Marleny,
Father Marcelo, and to be frank, my wife, whom I married not because I needed a
wife but a bosom friend. While in the Army, Sergeant First Class Charles T.
Hightower was a true a pure friend, he died in 1982. In my adolescent years,
Sid M., he died at nineteen, and Bill K., he died in his thirties (and during
those High School days, while at the school, I can’t honestly say I had any
special close friends, a lot of acquaintances, but none I hung out with, Dave
Olson was a friend of such quality for a short period of time). In my pre
adolescence, my brother, and Mike Reassert whom I might consider to be my first
friend, other than my brother, whom I met at St. Louis School, in 1956, and we remained
friends for a number of years, whom this story, if I can ever get started on,
is about, him and I, and vacant house.
As men we desire a multitude of relatives, —but we don’t call them
friends, we live in crowds, some prefer them others not so much, but they are
not friends, rather fly by night networks. And barfly’s are not friends, if you
remain sober. At work we have work friends, but they are mostly part of the
grid, but one can acquire, a lifetime friend; Robert Kramer, whom was the Vice
President of Midway National Bank, in the 1980s and ‘90s, was a good friend,
but the hardships of life separated us. We have brothers and sisters and
cousins, and nephews, sons, and daughters—but are they friends? Usually not,
just blood and sometimes similar DNA. Some
have the wealth of servants, and father and mothers to help one avert the
dangers of like, whereas we exactly see the contrary of a friend in them. Save only friendship would one give to the
other, unsuspiciously and eager his or her time, and perhaps a lot more; my
mother was more a friend in her retirement years than in her working years.
What rank, what merit should we attach to friendship? One even loses his own
relatives, careless it may be and scorns and jests, to content a friend. Some
unhesitatingly to procure his own death to save a friend, save only friendship
will do this.
As you can see in writing this preliminary
part to the sketch out, I have gone quite the distance to talk about
friendship, but Mike R., and I were like two peas in pod for number of years,
especially when we went romping and
searching old vacant houses in the St. Paul, Minnesota in those mid to late
1950s. I was eleven years old, Mike a tad younger. Empty and deserted buildings, houses, with
apartments in them, which held several species of insects, to include all
shapes and sizes of spiders, and designs in cobwebs. Looking about one becomes
overcome by poverty which when you look back has no grandeur to it, these
apartment complexes perhaps at the turn of the 20th century were
luxury, were now ruined, moldy debris, drapery torn, waving out the broken
windows, wine bottles allying about with branches and bits and pieces of bushes
that were over grown along the side of the houses along with vines creeping in
through the windows, and the summer breeze over my eleven year old conscious
face, the houses wanting to once again to look respectable, but never will.
The view extends on the whole downtown inner circle of the city. A city
along the Mississippi where small boats lull at the docks, and big boats glide
down the peaceful river, where if you listen close you can hear the cracking of
heavy rudders; the white ferry boats gleam in the sun, as we, Mike and I search
the houses for treasures. I once found a large old Civil War map, kept it for a
dozen years. And once a large framed picture of Notre Dame, of Paris, I kept it
even longer. Such treasures turned the
wheels of my mind back then, and provoked me in later years to go see Paris,
and Notre Dame, four times.
Birds flew in and out as if from old medieval machicolations: some of
those old houses had high arches from door to door and ledges that nests were
constructed on, and from them the birds chippered at us, and pigeons had their
say.
More often than not we’d spot a drunk, and his partner sprawled out in
one of the empty rooms, with dilapidated chimneys on one side of a wall, and
we’d gaze at them, and listen and breathed deep ready to run as if in the notch
of battlement, enjoying the balmy air circulating throughout the rooms from the
many holes in the roofs.
Most of the places, we romped through, were impregnated with pungent odor
of the ruins. Thus, without thinking of anything in particular, I dreamed I was
Marco Polo, soaked in sweat among the polished ivory.
Let me please end this with a gracious note if
I may. Now in old age, health is the highest gain, but when you are young, as
Mike R., and I were in those far-off days, contentment was the
highest wealth, and that contentment came out of trust and friendship. We were
free of the bad. We were good only because we were to each other, the noble
ones. That is to say, we were at ease with each other. Unfortunately, children
seldom find that in a parent, even when they grow old, if they could, they’d
find a path to the stars.
#1100/7-21-2015
