Apr. 18, 2002 - 21:59 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Forever Friends

Sometime in my twenty first year, at the railroad where I worked I became acquainted with a man at the yard office, Wm H. He was a bit older than I, married with two children when I first met Heather (She was a babysitter for his two children). At first I would be in the yard office at least once a night sometimes twice with waybills or switch orders then I began clerking in the freight house and only occasionally did we have a chance to visit. Somehow our personalities met on even ground. Wm. liked to read, he liked classical music, our tastes in food were similar. It was almost as if we were brothers. If one of us started a sentence, frequently the other would finish it. We liked to stop for a drink and a chat before the bars closed after we got off shift and we headed for home.

He was a living idol to me. He was a man of impeccable integrity and honesty. A hardworking man who was expert in carpentry, masonry and vehicular repair all which he learned in his early years. He had been in college and had to drop out and go to work to raise a family. He could run rings around me in anything that I can think of.

Yet for some strange reason we sparked each other to a higher level of understanding, compassion and commonsense. That commonsense thing, I learned during the first years of our friendship was something that had to be understood and practised diligently, commonsense doesn't grow on trees, I began to finally see. He was my mentor par excellence with out title, pay or glory.

Our ways parted, after the war I was working elsewhere and he continued working there and finishing college. Tragedy overtook him, his daughter fell into hot ashes, up to her armpits. It was no fault of anyone really (long and involved history there), his wife was nursing their third and last baby and the family was hard pressed to survive. She put her baby on formula and sold her milk to a hospital in town, making a tidy sum because fresh mother's milk was a premium foodstuff. That money as well as everything else they could scrape up saw their daughter through her long hospitalization and extended skin graft surgeries. Science and medicine did all for her that was possible, hundreds of poinpoint grafts were done and were successful. She made a good recovery and grew up sound, psychologically. She was by nature, an existentialist I think, realizing that bad stuff happens and that some of it had happened to her and resolutely coped with it. She is a woman happily successful in her life today. Jeepers she is older by a year or two than our oldest child and he will be 58 in June. In style all the time yet her body is tastefully covered from the shoulders down.

Wm. became a teacher for our school system and worked for the forest service in the summers. Somehow they got the hospitals and doctors paid off and my friend built a small cabin in the hills that he and his family used when enough improvements were made to it to live in while he was building their big mountain residence -- all on his own.

His last teaching years were in a school for exceptional children, the ones too far ahead and too active for any normal school to handle. I can't think of a better teacher to work in an environment like that. He was well known and respected by his peers as well as by the pupils that had been under his tutelage.

Wm. was always too busy to do much visiting and I was also, both of us raising families and myself and Heather twice away from our town - once for ten years. But we did manage to have visiting time together anyway. He and his wife attended the biggest affair that Heather and I had, a daughter of ours wedding and reception at our house. Warm sumertime, canopy to shade people outside, caterer, chairs and tables all around. A thing that it took our extended family working together to put together. My dear friend Wm. and I were able to sit and visit outside during the reception for a goodly amount of time.

That was the last time I ever saw him. The following year when school let out he did not work for the forest service, he and his wife traveled a bit to see their far flung progeny. In California, Arizona -- somewhere in the Southwest, at a motel he just didn't wake up one morning -- he was already on his biggest trip.

About this time every year, not too long after my birthday I spend time through the days just remembering him and his goodness and his kindnesses to me and mine and his courteous gentility. Win, lose, draw even past death we are Forever Friends . . . . . . . . .

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