Ernestly ?!Ernestly ?!By ERNIE NEUFELD, Weyburn Review Associate Publisher
"A toast!" exclaimed my childhood crony. Beside underlining several other highlights of our felicitous reunion including introduction to wives hardly or never previously met Al added the unbelievable words:
"To 66 years of friendship!"
"Sixty-six years!" I echoed in disbelief.
A quick mental calculation confirmed my old friend's figures that belied the weakness in mathematics he had once betrayed. My thoughts went back - in the miracle of memory still unmatched by the computer age to our first day in school.
We might have been aware of each other in the informal day-care milieu which had enjoyed the designation "kindergarten" in our home town. But until that school-day meeting, it had been acquaintanceship rather than friendship.
I remember being shoved - gently but persuasively - by an elder sibling into Miss K.'s beginners' class on that September morning in 1933. So many strange faces! What seemed like the safest refuge was a double seat immediately in front of the teacher's desk. I slipped into it and wished an end to the day, which presumably would permit return to the warmth of familiarity and friendly - if critical - faces.
Suddenly out of nowhere, a trio of laughing, chattering creatures in skirts, obviously lifelong friends, hove into near view and blocked my vision. Without so much as a by-your-leave - in fact, patently oblivious to my very existence - the trio slid into the seat I had claimed, leaving me in the far aisle without a support under my posterior.
I glanced about me in panic and desperation, and saw to my right a lone boy in a double-seat, looking almost as lost as myself. I slipped in beside him, and thus began an association lasting - admittedly with great time spans of separation - over the 66 years quantified in his toast as we celebrated our meeting in his trailer-home winter residence in Mesa, Arizona.
During our elementary and high school years, Al and I - and a few others - were always part of the same crowd. I cannot begin to describe the escapades: school scrapes that got us in the doghouse with teachers, siblings and parents; occasional hooky adventures that took us to a half-finished cabin in a pine woods a mile from town or to the home of an acquaintance - on a longer string than most of us - where we were permitted to smoke and play cards; double-dating or vying for the affections of the same girl; treks to Old Tom's abandoned farm barn where "something always happens"; playing hockey on the school rink or on frozen creeks; competing in an unsupervised softball league we organized; playing cops and robbers and Indians in the cow pasture or on the vast treed yard of one of our "gang"; philosophical debates on subjects really beyond our comprehension; and pondering our manifest destiny of reaching military age before the war ended, and envisioning - with tears threatening to erupt - our almost certain deaths in the heroic defense of our country; pleasant Sunday light suppers at one of several homes that suffered us gladly; playing homespun dice-driven hockey and baseball games; "studying" together on winter evenings (subject matter that had to be concealed at the sound of footsteps); going swimming (finances permitting) at swimming holes miles distant with whatever acquaintance had access to a truck that would carry a dozen or more (nickel a head); discussing hopes and plans for indistinct but highly successful futures then based more on wishful thinking than on family means and socioeconomic realities.
Eventually we planned to go to Toronto together. I went as planned with another member of our group, while Al pursued some other enticement. Al came to Toronto a year or two later, but only for a brief period, and we saw each other only a few times. Two or three years later we happened to work in Vancouver at the same time, and again managed to get together a few times, including one memorable evening when we held a wake for a mutual Manitoba friend who died suddenly and needlessly.
Eventually marriage and other diversions set in. While Al earned a doctorate at Yale and became a professor in Winnipeg, I became publisher of the Weyburn Review. Between raising families and other demands, we were seldom in contact again, but met briefly half a dozen times at family funerals in Manitoba, and once when a dear sister of mine went to great lengths to arrange a dinner for what was left (and available) of my old crowd.
The years sped by. Retirement - once unimagined - set in, and the miracle of e-mail dissolved the miles that separated us. We wrote lengthy letters, found we would be in Phoenix. Arizona, at the same time (he as a regular snowbird, myself as a winter visitor). We decided to meet - and it happened.
And we - and I hope our wives as well - are sure we will see each other again soon.
Like my annual year-end 10-year leaps, you may feel this has little to do with you. But I hope that reading about my renewal brings to mind friends of your own from whom you have been separated far too long, with shared experiences that are similar to mine - or wildly different - and that ought to bring you together once more. Do it! It sometimes works! And when it does it's sheer heaven.
My address (also listed on the Review's Website) is ernestly@pathcom.com.
Box 400, 904 East Avenue
Weyburn, SK
S4H 2K4
Phone: (306) 842-7487
Fax: (306) 842-0282
E-mail: weyburn.review@sk.sympatico.ca
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Review (1987) Ltd.
