Steve

A childhood friend and classmate died a couple of weeks ago.  It was sad to learn of his death, but I hadn’t had any contact with him since high school, so I can’t pretend that we were close.  But, try as I might, I couldn’t think of a single memory of him that wasn’t nice.  That’s something.

Steve went to my school, which drew students from around the Oshkosh area.  He lived in a neighborhood outside of town, and I would sometimes ride my bike out to that area to play football and baseball, and they would come into town for our junior baseball league games.

He wasn’t the best student in our class, but neither was I.  Far from it.  But my recollection is that he tried pretty hard, and reading his obituary it was clear that he had done well, graduating from college and serving time in the Navy before starting his second career.

It’s funny, but with the advent of Facebook, it’s possible to reconnect with a lot of people from early in your life.  I’ve found around half of the 25 classmates from my first nine years of school.  So, I know they’re alive.  I hadn’t found Steve, so, like the others who are unaccounted for, I didn’t know if he was alive or not.  It turns out that he was; but now he isn’t.

I believe that we all change as we travel through life, and it isn’t necessarily true that friends from fourth grade would be friends in our 60’s, given all the different experiences we have had.  But, personalities don’t really change much over time, according to psychologists, so maybe those people from the past would be, if nothing else, known commodities.

I do enjoy seeing comments on Facebook from some of those old friends of mine, and have exchanged emails with some.  There are a handful I’ve seen on and off in recent years, and it has been universally nice to see them.

It seems that Steve had a good life, and many people who cared for him, judging by the obituary anyway.  That’s good to know.  Life is more than passing a spelling test, fooling around in the lunch room, or playing baseball after school, but those things are a part of life we share with childhood friends, and I’m not sure a lot of things we do as adults are really any more important.

Goodbye to Steve, and to all my classmates of old, I appreciate the many rich memories of a time when we were all trying to figure out who we were and how we would fit in to this world.