Old Friends Too (a 4th of July Story)

Since the first time I started to write this piece, actually pretty much wrote this piece, and then ended up writing the piece about Michael Jackson and replacing it, I thought I would try again.

Given that today is the 4th of July, there is some poetry, some level of appropriateness to the fact that I would write about old friends on this day. The oldest friend I have in life, what a funny saying, he is not my oldest friend, he is the friend I have known the longest, and yes he is older than me, but I just want to remind him of that. My oldest friend and I have been friends since we I was two, or maybe three, depending on who you ask, but at our age we are talking rounding error. I have known this man for over forty years, yes, I said forty, and that is pretty scary, but it also pretty amazing, awesome, fantastic, remarkable, and most of all because of the 4th of July.

Years ago now, I do not know how many, I could probably figure it out, but since it is the 4th and I have been in the sun all day I do not want to overtax my brain, but anyway, years ago I was spending some time with my sister, she was “home” from Italy and I was home preparing for a bike ride I did every summer, and she said hey let’s go back to Warren for the 4th. I will do most anything for my sisters, especially if it is not that difficult to comply, so I said sure. We decided to leave early so we could see all of the festivities, and that was that.

Warren is Warren, VT, the town that Sugarbush Mountain Ski Resort is and where we grew up. You know the kind of towns where there is one stoplight and if you “blink you’ll miss it,” well Warren is smaller. There isn’t a stop light, there is barely anything, but there is the Warren Store, a creative name I realize, but that was it.

Growing up there this is the place we spent all of our time, they had penny candy, that actually cost a penny, at least to start, they had a Coca Cola Ice Chest in the back that was filled with Ice Water and bottled soda, the cooler had an old fashioned bottle opener on the front so you could open your soda and the cap would fall down into a tray, this was a cool cooler, and this was a cool place to be a kid, well once we were old enough to go there on our own.

When we were really young we had this family station wagon, with the seat way in the back that was turned around, and the back window that was “automatic,” which I make a big deal out of because I am pretty sure we got the first one, not the first model, but the first car off the line from that model. Anyway, you can probably figure out that this is the kind of town where all twenty people that live there know each other, and that are all comfortable with each other, to a point, but I could not have been much more than four when we parked outside the Warren Store so my mother could run in and get something, this was also the kind of town where not only did you leave your keys in the car, but you left your car running, and while my mother was in the store, some guy, he was a friend, but I didn’t know that, thought he would be funny and pretend to be tak9ing the car. I was a somewhat fiery young lad when I was little, hyper, emotional, scrappy, and when this guy jumped in the front seat of our running station wagon, I dove out the back window and took off into the store to get my mom to tell her he was stealing the car, and my siblings I might add. He wasn’t, but you weren’t going to convince me.

This was Warren, and this was the Warren store.

Warren was also streams and brooks, and rivers. Warren was trees and forest, actually National Forest, a lot of it, and it was Mountains, with three ski areas with the best skiing in the East. Warren was fishing, and swimming and running through the woods causing trouble. Warren was hitchhiking from one place to the next because there was a fair amount of area, even if there weren’t a large number of people, or stoplights. Most of all, I guess, Warren was the 4th of July, parade, fireworks, little league baseball games, and dunking booths. Warren on the 4th was Americana, it was Norman Rockwell.

Unfortunately, apparently everyone found this out while I was away traveling the world.

My sister and I, and my sister’s daughter Giulia, my niece and goddaughter, headed up to Warren early that morning. We were about an hour and fifteen minutes away, plus or minus, more minus, and we wanted to be there in time for the Parade, which I think was ten o’clock. To get there, when the weather is good one travels over “the mountain,” which is actually Roxbury Gap, but in our family, and to most of the people that are from that area, is referred to as “going over the mountain.” And again, you can only do so in good weather. I remember coming back from a holiday trip to “The Street,” the area in North Providence where my father’s family is from, and my dad decided to go over the mountain, only it was snowing and there had been a great deal of snow already. As we were heading up the mountain, about half way up, we hit something in the road, probably a chunk of ice, a big chunk, and the station wagon, the same one I once dove out of, spun around three hundred and sixty degrees, actually it was about three hundred and ninety by the time the car came to rest, having blasted its way through the snow bank, missing a large tree by about a foot as it did. I know how much we missed the tree by because my sister and I were sitting in that very same back seat that faced backwards and I saw it wiz by. I digress as usual.

We went over the mountain on the way to Warren for the fourth, and as you come down off the mountain, just after you realize that you do indeed still have brakes, you turn left at a four way stop and head into “town.” About a mile later, still a few miles from the “center” of Warren, we began to see this long line of cars parked on the both sides of the road and we both began to look, and be, quite puzzled. The closer we got the denser the cars were, they were parked absolutely everywhere, and it became apparent, that this road, on this day and time, was now one way in the direction we were headed, which was a good thing since the parked cars were beginning to seriously squeeze us. The farther we had gone into this mess the more I was determined to just keep going, turn up the drive, just a hundred yards shy of the center of town, that led to the Warren Elementary School, a newer schoolhouse, newer when we were there, and then renovated by the family construction company the summer after my junior year in high school. I just was set on making this happen, especially given how little time we had left, and that we had Giulia with us and she could not have done that walk, nor could I have carried her that far, unless I absolutely had to.

When we arrived at the school driveway there was only one small problem, no it was not gone, although I guess that was a real possibility, there were four Sherriff’s Officers there not letting people up the drive. I have no idea what I said to them, but a few minutes later we were on our way up the drive and parking just a few feet away from the path that led down to the stop sign, the one and only, at main street in Warren.

We did the jaunt and appeared in town just in front of the Warren Store, and there literally thousands of people there, everywhere, all lining the street, in yards, sitting on steps of porches, hanging out of second story windows, it was absolutely amazing how many people there were, and how much this little fourth of July celebration of ours had grown. This once very local, very friendly, very Vermont 4th, was now a “beerfest” 4th celebration complete with the jazz band playing on the second floor deck, I never knew there was one, in front of the Warren Store.

Well, you can imagine that I kept Giulia and my sister very close, as we made our way to the store, and then as we looked up at the band we noticed that the gentlemen singer, African American gentlemen to be precise, and I only point this out because he had been the only African American gentlemen in the entire area for years, no decades, and we had been friends all that time until I drifted away. This is when things really got amazing because after looking up, and making eye contact and smiling hello, I turned my head to my right, towards the side of the store where there were some people congregating, and some food vendors and such, and there, right in front of me was my oldest friend, that I known since I was two, and that I had not seen in the decade previous, at least, with graduate school and all the traveling. Actually the last time I had seen him, from what I can recall, was when he and another of our friends from Warren had come to Providence to watch me play in a football game because he and I had always talked about, planned on, dreamt about, playing for the Dallas Cowboys, and in Warren, and actually that whole area, there was no football, which is why I moved.

Anyway, I turned, we saw each other, huge, Texas sized smiles, which is odd because neither of us are from Texas, and then an even bigger hug, not a man hug, but a good old fashioned Italian embrace. I have not been any more happy in my life than to be there seeing and speaking to this man, meeting his wife, there is a entire story and a half there, but the abridge version is that they met on a ski lift, he never got her name, but knew where she worked somehow, wrote a letter to the company she worked for and described her and where he had seen her, they gave her the message and then they got married, abridged.

We have been friends for over forty years, and eventually I will actually write a piece about the friends I have, but I guess the point is that nothing was any different that day, than ever, except the whole wife thing which we will not explore further at this time. From that moment on we have remained close, gone on an amazing trip to Whistler together, built his house together; speak on the phone regularly when we are not together, share meals when we are. We have done countless bike rides for cancer research together, and/or as a part of the same cycling team. I founded the team a very long time ago, he brought a bunch of friends to the party and another sponsor, and now that I have grown a bit tired after twenty years of this he and his wife have taken the lead.

We are friends, were very close when we were young, learning to ski, and then skiing the mountain together, jumping out of the gondola together, possibly lighting firecrackers under the lids of the sap cans in the woods together, I said possibly, playing soccer together, defending each other in school, and now just being there for each other as we move through life at an ever increasing pace.

When I hear the Simon and Garfunkel tune, “Old Friends,” this is who I think of, this is not a knock on anyone, but there is nobody that I have known anywhere near this long, or that I have shared so many parts of so many decades. We are truly “Old Friends.”

Thank you again for getting this far with me.