Friendship

When I was a kid, I couldn't have imagined having friends that go back 50 years.  'Course, you couldn't have convinced me that I'd live to be 50, so I guess that point is moot.  The fact of the matter is that I have a bunch of them, and hear from them fairly often.  In fact, I have two that I play golf with every week.  I've got a bunch on Facebook, who report in from a bunch of places from all over the globe, or some, like me, who came back to Vacaville after a period of absence, and some that never left.  I have a bunch of FB friends whom I haven't known for quite as long, some have been for quite a while, though, but not 50 years.

So many of my classmates are no longer with us.  Some succumbed to the violence of war; some from the ravages of drugs.  Still others have passed from "natural" causes (although I can never see something that starts eating the body that hosts it as "natural"), and others through recklessness, or carelessness, and these are the people I've known the longest.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid, by the time I could learn all the names of the kids in the neighborhood, we'd move again.  Right up to the 1957 move to the house on Bergwall Way in Vallejo.  We lived there for eight years.  Three before my dad retired from the Navy, and five while he worked at the California Medical (Correctional) Facility in Vacaville.  Today, people wouldn't think twice about driving 27 miles to work,  but in the early '60's the Interstates were just getting built, and Dad had to run US 40 through Fairfield, and into Vacaville.  For the first time, I had friends that I could hang-out with, go on hikes with, take a bus across Vallejo (paying the 25 cent fare, each way, with money we made picking up bottles and claiming the deposits) and go swimming at "The Plunge," a pool adjacent to Vallejo High, and play a lot of neighborhood games.  Then, one day, Dad comes home, and we're going to move again.  In June of 1965, days after my sister Pat graduates from Hogan High, we're picking up, lock-stock-and-barrel, and moving into an apartment in Vacaville.

At the time, I thought it was the worst thing that could happen to me.  Vallejo was a city, with 65,000 people in it.  Vacaville was a fruit stand on the highway, a rural community comprised of less than 14,000 when we first moved in.  Other than the prison, the big employers were Travis AFB, and the Basic Vegetable Processing plant that gave the town its distinctive odor, onions, mostly, but at the end of the onion season, they would process garlic for a short while.  Even after the season was over, the town still reeked of onions.  The locals used to joke that blind people could tell when they got to Vacaville (by the smell).  I didn't think it was that funny...

So, my parents, my sister, and I are living in a second-floor 3BR apartment, that overlooks the pool and cabana.  It's summer-time, we've just moved into an apartment with a pool, and I get an ear infection on moving day, had it worsened by attending the races, that night, at the Vaca Valley Drag races, and spent most of that first night in my new home in the emergency room at the (then) Travis AFB Hospital (it became David Grant during my high school years), with an earache.  It was July before I was allowed to use the pool.

Actually, I have to admit it, but I figured that this apartment building had to have lots of girls my age, so I'd get to know some people before school started [BUZZ].  Most of the female population of the apartment building were working women, or wives, all but a girl named Barbara who was two years younger than me, still hadn't shed her "baby fat," had a brutal case of acne, and was someone, I found fairly quickly, I just couldn't stand being around.  It looked like it was going to be a l-o-n-g summer.

Sometime in July, the Vacavile Reporter, a local-news paper that came out on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, had a notice for high school boys interested in playing football that a physical was required, and that physicals would be given free by Dr. Cavanaugh, at the Vaca High Gym, on a certain date/time (c'mon people, it's been 50 years for goodness sakes).  I talked about it with my dad, and he was always trying to get me to get involved in sports, so I reported to the gym at the appropriate time, and got into a line.  Understand, I know absolutely NO ONE.  To be truthful, I don't even know much about football, but I show up, get in the line, and wait my turn.  The first thing I learn is that I'm not into the local jargon, so I only understand about half of what is being said around me.  Then there's this kind of pudgy kid, cracking jokes and laughing; at first I thought he was annoying, but by the time we got through the line, we had become friends.

I've never told him so, but he helped me a lot in those first days at Vaca High.  He was a sophomore, a survivor of his freshman year, mostly because he had an older brother who'd beat the crap out of anyone who picked on him, but it was he who schooled me in local-speak, where the "cool people" hung out, and how to know when upperclassmen were screwing with you.  I never met his older brother, but I have come to know why he was so protective of his little brother, and after the older brother was killed in Vietnam, I tried to help "little brother" whenever I could.  Besides, we have lived somewhat parallel lives, both being raised in a military family, both coming to Vacaville because our dads worked at CMF, and we had fathers who were so much alike, they couldn't stand to be in the same room together.

I would be gone for long periods of time, and he would be the first person (except on one occasion)
I would connect with whenever I got home (the very idea of a "home" was inconceivable when I first moved here, so you see I have a lot invested in Vacaville).  I'd look him up, get caught up on all of the gossip, and find out what was going on in town, and somehow feel that I hadn't been gone for years at a time.  Somewhere along the line, he took up golf, and when I wasn't living in town, I would make sure we played a round, or two any time I visited.  After we moved back in 1989, we'd play every Saturday, if I wasn't deployed.  From '94 to '99, when I was in Paradise, CA, going to Chico State, we'd get in a round whenever, but from '94 to '97, I was either in class, or at work, 7-days a week.  It was, actually, 2000 before we started playing together on a regular basis again, but that would be broken up by our 18 months in Spokane, WA, although we played twice during that time.  In 2005, when I got back, it was Saturdays, until August of 2014 when he retired.  Since then, it's been a couple of rounds a week.

I am grateful to have had a friend for 50 years, even though he feels more like my brother.