~ Joe
I
remember an afternoon in the dog days of summer. I’m pretty sure it was a
Tuesday, but as far as month, year or other specific date, I couldn't say for
sure. I was still living in Midvale at the time. Not a surprising fact, seeing
as I lived in Midvale for the entirety of my childhood. The Zitting family was
still living across the street, which helps date this story a little. They
moved when I was 11. That was a big day; they used our trailer; there’s still a
gouge in their asphalt driveway from where the hitch bottomed out as they drove
away. This story, though, isn't about them moving. It does, however, revolve
around their youngest son and my best friend, Josh.
Josh
and I had been friends since, well, birth. He’s 10 days older than I, his
parents were one of the few couples in the neighborhood with whom my parents
were actually friends, and, thus, we spent a majority of our summers in each
other’s back yard. This is where we find a young me, and a young Josh, huddled
over a weathered plank. It was a two-by-four that had been sitting in Josh’s
back yard for ages. I think we found it by the butt-warmer, next to the stinky
shed. Yup, we were boys of the purest sort. Potty jokes, baseball, and double
dares were what we were all about.
At this
point, our attentions were consumed by only a couple of thoughts: 1) we were
bored, and 2) we were tired of being bored. Thus we found ourselves hunched
under the shade of his back porch, scheming over a piece of driftwood.
“Let’s
make it a battleship,” suggested one of us. I’m going to say it was me, because
I usually came up with our most brilliant of schemes.
“Naw,
it should be an airplane,” said Josh, who was really the one who came up with
our most brilliant schemes.
“But an
airplane would be too hard, plus we don’t have enough wood. If we make a boat,
we can float it down the canal when we’re done.”
The
canal in question was an irrigation ditch that ran through the northern half of
our neighborhood. On the other side of the green, murky water was Josh’s elementary
school. Most every kid in the neighborhood went there, and the Canal, being a
forbidden playground for most moms in the neighborhood, held an irresistible attraction.
I looked for just about any excuse to get over there.
“If we
don’t build an airplane, I don’t want to play with you anymore. You can go
home.”
Josh was
one to demand, and usually get, his way. Not wishing to spend another summer
dodging Mom’s “If you’re going to mope around the house all day, you can do
your summer homework,” bit, I thought quickly.
“Listen,
if we make a battleship, you can name it.”
“Meh, I
don’t want to,” came the unimpressed reply.
“A-and
you can put it in the canal all by yourself when we’re done with it,” I countered,
with a shade more desperation showing in my voice.
“But an
airplane would be so cool.”
He was
not one to be easily swayed.
“If we
do the boat, we’ll do a home run derby after, and you can start with 20 home
runs. I’ll even pitch first.”
This was the nail in the proverbial
coffin. In the economy of kid summers, wiffle ball was the Gold Standard. For
those of you who didn't have much of a childhood, wiffle ball is baseball
played with a skinny plastic bat and a plastic ball covered in holes. The ball
didn't go super far, and when it hit something, like a window in a suburban
neighborhood, it didn't break anything, making it an ideal backyard game. As
baseball players, Josh and I couldn't get enough of it. It was usually only
when we got bored of pitching to each other that we found ourselves doing
something else, like debating whether to build a battleship or an airplane out
of a piece of scrap wood.
“Fine,
but I get to do all the designing.”
“Deal.” With all that settled, and Josh on board, we set to work.
This
little build started with a raiding party to my house. By trade, my Dad is a
filmmaker. He does, however, moonlight as a woodworker. It started as a hobby,
but as his film career got more and more sparse, he bowed out of the universe of
tinsel and became a self-employed carpenter. He, for a short period, made
Shaker-style furniture out of our garage, turning his hobby into full-time
employment. Through his stint as a hobbyist, and fueled by this career change,
my Dad had amassed a stockpile of tools. The power tools were off limits, but,
growing up in this shop, I was allowed to play with most of the hand tools. I
had my own set, but that didn’t keep Dad from finding his good hammers dripping
with morning dew in the front yard.
Knowing
this was where today’s adventure would begin, Josh and I sprinted through my
kitchen, grabbed the house keys from the top drawer of the right-hand cabinet
(the one that’s to the right of the stove, and to the left of the garbage can –
the phone sits on that counter now), and unlocked the shop door.
We didn’t bother to turn on the
lights. There was more than enough ambient light coming through the gap in the
door to the backyard. This door was old, broken, and didn’t lock properly.
There was, as I mentioned, a gap of at least three inches where the thin,
brittle wood had been kicked away by some unnamed scamp. The white paint was
peeling away in long ribbons, and you’d get splinters from it if you weren’t
careful. Such was the back door to the garage.
In the dimness, Josh and I
rummaged. We found a hammer, a hand saw, some nails, a few scraps of wood, and
some tempura paints that I had gotten for Christmas years before. We escaped
the sawdusty garage, tools in tow, and scampered off across the street. As we
opened Josh’s white vinyl gate, Jennifer Lee and Natalie Zitting (one of Josh’s
three older sisters) strutted up to us. They had, they proudly announced, just
come back from Activity Days, a weekly get-together activity put on by the
church we all went to, where they and the rest of the neighborhood girls had an
enviously good time. They made it very clear that boys were not allowed at
Activity Days, and then nosed around our business.
Remember, in our boyhood minds,
girls were the enemy, and it was against all protocol to let them have last
bragging rights. We, therefore, boasted wildly about our ship-building
adventures, told them to get lost, ran across the threshold of the back yard, and
hastily shut the white gate behind us. We then put our tools down on the cement
at the foot of the sliding glass doors that led into Josh’s den.
Proceeding in a fury of activity,
fueled by a determination not to have less fun than a group of girls, we
cobbled together a bridge, guns, and a flight deck lined with half-penny nail
runway lights. In a brilliant creative swing, Josh took the saw, swung it like
a hammer, and gouged the teeth into the wooden planks, creating a realistic
bullet-hole effect. We called her the USS
America, and painted her a brilliant red, white, and blue.
We talked of baseball and Pokemon,
Playstation games, cartoons, and skateboarding as we waited for the paint to
dry. Josh’s parents had taken half of their back yard and covered it in cement,
creating a multi-sport patio of epic proportions. We played a few games of
horse while we waited, and I got skunked. Josh was a natural-born athlete,
surrounded by siblings who hit home runs, had mean tennis serves, who were good
at volleyball, football, dance, and basketball. He, therefore, was intensely
competitive and pretty darn good at everything. I envied his abilities, and
could never quite match him for skill. That didn’t keep us from having a great
time, but the kid was an all-star. I tended to bask in his glory and walk in
his shadow.
Paint finally dry, we took our
proud destroyer up the street, around the corner, and out to sea. As Josh
shoved our ship into the water, we hummed the national anthem and sprinted down
the banks, watching the current speed our boat down the canal. We lost sight of
it as it crossed under a bridge, and bid it farewell.
Trudging back home as the day began to settle into evening, I was
filled with a satisfaction of a summer day spent with my best friend.
Definitely a day well spent.
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