My childhood friend Andy died last week. We hadn't seen each other much since we came adults, but as kids, growing up in a small, Southwest Georgia neighborhood, we were inseparable.
My mother called to tell me the news. The memories that came flooding back overwhelmed me.
I loved summers as a kid. I don’t know if kids today have it as lucky as we did. First, so many parents I know want to schedule every minute of their child’s day. Second, because of the crazy nature of our world, kids aren’t always able to roam their neighborhoods like we did.
When I was a kid, summers were spent outside. It’s not that Andy and I didn’t have important things to do. We did.
We had forts to build, trails to blaze, baseball to play and fish to catch. And if you didn’t feel like fishing, you could catch tadpoles or turtles and keep them as pets until you got tired of them, at which time you’d set them free again.
This, of course, was in the days before kids could bake their brains playing video games for hours on end on PlayStations and Wiis, back when we had to use your imagination when we played.
We'd hop on our bicycles and ride all over the neighborhood, our bikes becoming fire trucks or Army tanks or spaceships.
I grew up in a neighborhood with lots of kids, and we all spent most of the day outside, chased inside only by the occasional scattered thunderstorm or our mothers’ need for us to help shell peas.
When someone's mother wanted us, she just stepped into the front yard and hollered for us to come.
Andy and I used to ride our bicycles a couple of miles up the road to the Suwannee Swifty store to buy candy and drinks. Suwannee Swifty was the small-town equivalent of the big-city 7-Eleven, which got its name because it stayed open from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. We didn’t have 7-Elevens in Blakely back then. Nothing stayed open that late.
We usually bought RC Colas. I don't remember why, but I do remember bringing those RC Colas and a bag full of candy back to the neighborhood, where we'd sit on the bank of the lake, enjoy our treats and watch for turtles.
Andy was cooler than I was. His parents let him have a go-cart, and Lord, we must have ridden that thing hundreds of miles through the woods near our houses – an area that is now a neighborhood.
We stayed in our forts or on that go-cart until it got dark. Then it was time to go home.
But that’s usually when the adults would gather on the front porch and talk about whatever it was adults talked about. The kids would get to run around the yard, playing hike-and-go-seek or Red Rover or whatever.
I really miss those days. I long for those carefree times when the most important thing to worry about was how many turtles you’d catch today.
I hate that we drifted apart as we got older, but I hope Andy recalled those childhood days as fondly as I do.
Rest in peace, friend.
