Larry

February 22, 2016

Greetings from the inward glance,

We lived in a small house on a street crowded with small houses.  A street like thousands of others in the city, a random assortment of families starting out, retired couples, lonely widows, boisterous teenagers.  Not every driveway was paved, not every house had a screen door.  Postage stamp yards packed with toddlers and dogs and gardens and tricycles.   

Larry lived across the street from our house.  It was a small journey but in many ways important because he was one of my first friends.

I am lucky to have grown up in neighborhoods where I could make friends.  Throughout most of my life this would mean going outside and running around until I met someone to play with or attracted a large enough group to muster a game of some kind.

It is a little different when you are five, waiting for the big day when you are allowed to cross the street on your own, after the fundamentals of looking both ways have been ingrained,                        the principles of which I still recall and largely employ.

The trip across Barth Street, going to play with Larry, was a study in contrasts.  Our house was a frenetic panoply of activity.  Three children, soon to be four, laundry folded on the davenport, grandparents wedged in the tiny dining area, dinner boiling for visiting relatives, immigrant uncles living in our upstairs, diapers, toys, noise, chaos.  It was a three ring circus in a one ring tent.

Larry’s house was quiet enough to hear the tick of the clock. He was an only child, neatly ensconced in a tidy room of his own.  There were pillows on the chairs, there may have been flowers on the table.  There were no fingerprints on the walls.  I know because mine were wiped off promptly.

Larry never came to our house.

He was a gangly kid, with cropped hair and thick glasses.  He had a goofy smile, which was standard issue, and sort of distracted look, as if he was thinking of something else while you talked to him. And then suddenly he would be present, his eyes big and round behind the lenses.

I don’t remember Larry’s parents much, and my view of them was typical of any five year old;  I remember their knees mostly.  But I do recall the elevated level of tension, his mother hovering, observing, present.

It was arranged that I come to visit and play with Larry.  We did what all boys do when thrown into that circumstance; invented a way to make a noisy mess.  We explored Larry’s toys by spreading them about the room and then creating ways to have fun at the top of our voices.

Larry’s mother would occasionally stick her head in the room to see what mischief we had created.  It took me a little while to learn what she was really looking for.  Larry would occasionally become focused on something that would upset his mother.  A wiggler.

Larry would find something, a thin finger of packing foam, a rubber dart, the end of a rope, and he would hold it in front of his eyes and wiggle it.  The tip would vacillate in front of his thick glasses, his eyes unblinking, hypnotized by the movement.  He would be lost to our conversation, gone from the boy’s world of toy cars and dinosaurs and pretend.

I don’t know what worried parents and the experts they consulted would have said about Larry. Things were defined differently in those days.  It was not something that registered with me since I only had one label that mattered: friend.  I don’t remember ever asking him about his fascination.

Wigglers had been removed from Larry’s life but he was a resourceful kid.  One day when his mother had determined the order of the house could no longer tolerate two rambunctious boys we were dispatched to the back yard.  We revved Tonka trucks and piled up sticks and ran around whooping or mimicking low flying planes.

Larry plopped into the grass and sat cross legged, plucked a long green frond from the earth and held it in front of his eyes.  The breeze did the rest, waggling the weed before him, hypnotizing him again.  I lay in the grass, my face propped in my hands, and waited for Larry to return.

His mother got there first.  She snatched the weed from his hand and snapped at Larry.  The words I don’t remember but the message I do; she was at her wits end. Why wouldn’t he stop with this wiggler nonsense?  She stomped her foot and wagged her finger and used all of the parental tone at her disposal, and then left in a cloud of frustration, delivering the last word from the porch, the ultimate salvo; wait until your father gets home.

I looked at Larry, expecting to see the hot tears tracing his cheeks, but he was composed, unperturbed.  He puffed out his cheeks and blew a breath, and watched the cropped green blades flutter.  And smiled.  He looked at me and raised his eyebrows, as if to say ‘It’s the way it is.  What can you do?’

My horizons expanded and I explored our street from Dupont to Chevrolet and every space between every house, and the shops on the corner, and the scary alleyway, and the places behind the garages where trash was burned.  Larry did not go with me.  He was framed in by the wiggler free boundaries of his yard.

When we moved away from Barth Street a couple years later I was only seeing Larry if he was outside.  We were friends, and even though no one explained the rules, I knew they had changed. I don’t remember saying goodbye. 

In the decades since then I have been in the company of a myriad of friends, all shades and different intensities, and varying lengths of time.  Each made their own impression, each gave me something else to know and learn and share with the next friend.

In all of that time I have gained some perspective about what is unique in all of us, including me, and what is common among all of us.  I’ll admit I don’t always use the persective wisely but there’s a good reason to keep trying.  Some friends had ragged jeans, or red hair, or a chipped tooth, or pigeon toes, or a honking laugh, or black skin, or went to a different church.  But beyond all that, behind the wiggler, there was always a story worth knowing. 

Hope this finds you making friends,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith