WE ALL, IF WE’RE LUCKY, HAVE SOMEONE in our lives like Jack—our first friends, our oldest friends.
If we’re especially fortunate, they remain close to us no matter where the world leads us. We don’t have to live in the same cities; we don’t have to see each other on a daily basis. Friendships—especially the oldest friendships—don’t require that.
No one knows us better. No one in our adult lives saw us the way we first were, before the inevitable defenses against a thorny world went up, before the layers of protective walls around us were constructed. We didn’t invite the arrival of those defenses; we didn’t willingly participate in the building of those walls. They come, eventually, with life—included in the package.
We all have someone who was there before all of that.
If we’re lucky, the someone is with us for a very long time.
I KNOW THE EXACT MOMENT I MET HIM.
We were in kindergarten, at the Cassingham Elementary School in Bexley, Ohio, about a block and a half from his house.
Those first weeks in kindergarten are confusing—thrilling, and a little overwhelming, but mostly confusing. For the first time, you’re on your own. You’ve been dropped off at school the first day, and suddenly you find your new world unfolding in a building other than your parents’ house. You’re the youngest in the school—you’re five, and on the stairways sometimes you see people as old as twelve, laughing and talking loudly and clearly familiar with each other in a way that you’re familiar with no one. In an unfamiliar place like that you can feel pretty small. Especially because you are.
The classroom, on the south end of the first floor of the building, was filled with keyed-up noise most mornings. Everything was new, every day—the layout, the snack routine, recess, the bells out in the hallways…nothing seemed remotely like anything you had experienced before.
Miss Barbara was the teacher. She was just a few years out of Ohio State University—Barbara Drugan was her name, and although to us she seemed as old as someone in a history book, she was still in her early twenties.
We had all, on the first day, been told each other’s names, but those dozens of names were hard to remember; in the initial weeks, Miss Barbara asked us to call out our own names every day as she took attendance. I think she probably was doing it for a reason—she already knew who was there and who wasn’t, she was having us do the roll call out loud so we would gradually become recognizable to each other. Put names to faces, for the first time in our lives.
So we sort of knew—we didn’t know every name in the classroom on Cassingham Road, but we were getting there, day by day.
One afternoon we were all sitting on the floor, in a semicircle around Miss Barbara, who was reading to us. I was sitting near the back of the group of children, and I thought I noticed something on my upper lip—it felt as if my nose was dripping.
I didn’t have a Kleenex or a handkerchief, so I lifted my hand to my face to wipe away whatever was there. It didn’t seem to work; I swiped my hand against the top of my mouth, but my upper lip felt just as wet afterward.
I looked at my hand. It was red. I was bleeding.
I’d had nosebleeds before, but at home my mother was always close by to take me into the bathroom and help me make the bleeding stop. She would hold a piece of tissue to my nose, and hold my head back, and sometimes, if she needed to, she would get a piece of ice.
Now I was sitting on the floor at the back of the semicircle of other five-year-olds, and I put my hand to my face again, and it came away covered in blood.
I was embarrassed. I didn’t know what to do. When you’re that age, the last thing you want is to be singled out in public because something is wrong with you. You just want to fit in with everyone else, to be lost in the crowd.
I put the other hand up to my face, trying to do this as quietly as I could. I only wanted the bleeding to stop. I tilted my head down toward the linoleum floor, hoping no one would see what was going on. I lifted the bottom of my T-shirt to my face, pressed it against my nose, thinking that if I did that, the pressure would stop the blood.
It didn’t. Now the shirt had blood on it, and the more I attempted to stop the bleeding, the more bloody the shirt became. I was beginning to feel a five-year-old’s panic; the blood was coming out faster now, it was all over me and all over my clothes, and I had no idea what to do. I felt as if this was somehow my fault. I bent over even further, trying to disappear into the floor, doing everything I could to let no one see me.
Then, a few feet away from me, someone stood up.
I heard his voice before I saw him. I had been staring straight down, scared and ashamed.
“Miss Barbara?” I heard the voice say.
She stopped reading aloud.
“Bob’s hurt,” the voice said.
His name was Jack Roth. We didn’t know each other, but he had been listening during the daily roll call, and had learned my name.
He stood there looking at Miss Barbara, and she looked at him, and then over at me—blood all over me—and within a minute I was down in the school nurse’s office, getting help, getting cleaned up, being told not to worry, everything was going to be fine.
“Bob’s hurt.” He hadn’t hesitated even a second. Like the rest of us, the last thing in the world he wanted was to disrupt this new kindergarten world we were all just getting used to; like the rest of us, he was feeling his way every day, learning the customs, figuring out the rules. Standing up and interrupting the teacher was not something that came easily, especially that early along the path on which we were just starting out. When the teacher was speaking, you didn’t.
But there he was. Standing straight up, for someone he didn’t yet know.
AT FIFTY-SEVEN, ALL THESE YEARS LATER, we walked from Audie Murphy Hill to the house where he now lived, the house where his wife was waiting.
For most of our young lives, in the hours after school, we would go either to his house or to mine. In the early years, our mothers would almost always be home; in the 1950s, at least in this pocket of central Ohio, mothers who were stay-at-home housewives were the rule, working mothers were the exception.
My mother would have egg salad sandwiches ready for us; his mother would have Toll House cookies. I had never heard those words in combination before—“Toll House,” as a brand and as a concept, was a stranger to the house where I grew up, the words might as well have been a foreign phrase until I met Jack—but the afternoon aroma of those cookies baking in the oven in his mother’s kitchen was the sensory signature of that house on Ardmore. Out on the gentle slope at the edge of his front lawn we might have fooled ourselves into thinking we were American combat soldiers—but we were combat soldiers who, when the battle was over, returned not to foxholes or mud-splattered tents, but to chocolate-chip cookies just a few steps inside the back door.
Jack’s mother died when he was fifteen. We who were his closest friends knew she had been sick, but we’d had no hint she had been that kind of sick. There was a little paid death notice in the paper saying that Mildred Roth of 228 South Ardmore Road in Bexley had passed away, and from that day forward when he went home in the afternoons it was to an empty house. If he ever felt cheated by that—if he ever felt lonely, or let down, or hollow inside, if he ever walked in that back door and turned on the lights and knew before he consciously knew it that the comforting scent of those cookies was no longer present, that it wasn’t coming back—if he ever went to his room and closed his eyes and cried, he didn’t tell us about it.
“Bob’s hurt,” he said that day when we were five.
But when he was hurt, he kept it inside.
IF YOU ARE NOT PARTICULARLY FAMOUS in the eyes of the world—even in the local eyes of your local world—then the chances are dim that your passing will be noticed.
If your accomplishments are quiet accomplishments, cherished only by those who love you, likely you will go in silence.
The friends who mean everything to us—the friends without whom our lives would be empty—are our most enduring models of grace and good fortune. When we lose them—and we all do; we all will—we realize, then and forever, that our own lives have been filled to over-brimming with the grand, invisible gifts they have given us. We know that our time on earth would have had paltry meaning had not, one fine day, our lives connected for the first time with the lives of the people who would turn out to be our most treasured friends.
Jack didn’t get a news obituary in the local paper—just a paid death notice in agate type. His life, like that of his mother, did not attract the attention of a reporter working for a daily newspaper.
You didn’t know him. But there is someone in your life very much like him.
Someone…and something.
This is the biography of a friendship.
Someone could write it about the dearest friendship in your life. If you’re lucky—and you probably are—that kind of friendship is there, or it was, once upon a wondrous time.