The first time I met Al I was stuck-up, self-centered, and as round as a basketball. I was also four years old. Al was three at the time, mature for his age, and looked like a whiffle ball bat shortly after being hit by a steamroller. In fact, whenever Al went over to a friend's house for dinner, the mother never seemed to mention those poor, starving children over in China, she just gave all her kids' leftovers to Al.
I shared my childhood with Al, his brother Ken, and my brother, Jeff. We weren't exactly the brightest group of guys when we got together, as the "Hey, let's see what happens when we throw heavy rocks at our large living room window" incident would attest, but we were often the happiest.
As kids, baseball was our reason for being. Despite the fact that there's a two year difference between myself, the oldest of the four, and Ken, the youngest, every time we got together to play two-on-two baseball, age meant nothing. Al and I loved the Yankees; Jeff and Ken, the Dodgers. So there were our teams. Only I called us, "The Big Guys," and Jeff and Ken's team, "The Little Guys." (I told you I was stuck-up.)
No matter how often we played, the outcome was always the same: "The Little Guys" would start yelling at "The Big Guys" or vice versa, which led to fighting, making up, fighting again, making up again, and then verbally berating each other until it was either time to go home or to go eat ice cream. This went on for nearly fifteen years until, one day, we realized it was way more fun to skip the game entirely and go eat ice cream, which was fine, because I don't think we ever finished a game in those fifteen years anyway. Unless, of course, we were playing at a public ball field and there were girls watching us. Then, for some reason, we always behaved...
Al began dating Katie when he was a freshman in high school. Katie was a junior, but not only that, she was very popular, very smart and very attractive. To put it bluntly, Jeff, Ken and I couldn't believe Al's luck. He was dating a beautiful young woman we wouldn't have dared make eye contact with if she was handing us free tacos. Yeah, we were jealous.
Some of the best times I spent with Al were when our families went summer camping in the Adirondacks. Camping is great fun for young males, largely due to the two basic human instincts all ten-year-old boys have within them. Namely, "Let's see what rocky surfaces we can jump off of while wearing large hiking gear," and "Let's see how fast we can run through poisonous, dense, mosquito-infested foliage - wearing only our underwear."
One time, Al and I decided to race from his parents' car to our camping site (over a mile away), carrying sleeping bags, backpacks, and, if I remember correctly, a pocketful of large, jagged rocks we had collected in the parking lot for skipping across a nearby lake's surface.
Seconds after we began running, Al tripped. I kept going. That is, until I tripped twenty yards later. Al sprinted past me. By the time I picked myself up, he had about a five yard lead on me.
At this point, our knees were all cut up and our elbows were bleeding, yet we continued on at a torrid pace. Why? For no reason at all except that we were ten years old and probably had to pee.
Just as I caught back up with Al, my foot snagged a large root and down I went. Hard. The pain from the weight of my backpack crashing down on my head was nowhere as strong as what I felt when the rocks in my pocket went smashing against things little boys (or big boys, for that matter) don't want smashed. Ever.
I was ready to cry when I looked over to my right and saw Al, lying on his stomach, staring at me. He, too, had tripped on the very same root and judging from the look on his face, he'd stuck more rocks in his pockets than I had.
Suddenly, we both started laughing. There we were, in the middle of nowhere, caked in mud, our backpacks and sleeping bags all dirty and disheveled, having the time of our lives. I don't know what it was about that moment, but I'll never forget it. I hope Al won't either.
A year and a half after Al and Katie started dating, Katie graduated from high school. They both decided it would be for the best if they split up. It was a very mature decision, actually, but mature decisions don't make living with the consequences any easier. Being Al's best friend and all, I really didn't know what to do or say. Well, besides asking if he'd like to go racing through a patch of poison ivy with me for old time's sake. For some reason, I didn't think he would.
One night when I was about twelve, Al and Ken were over for a tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich dinner. As often would happen when the four of us got together, a glass of milk was spilt. Being pre-pubescent boys, we all started screaming as we leapt back from the table as if a beaker of sulfuric acid was burning through our placemats.
My mother was not pleased by our behavior, but cleaned up the mess and then returned to the other room. Five minutes later, another glass of milk was seeping through the tablecloth. My mother came in the kitchen looking as if someone had just steamrolled her vegetable garden. When she left the room, she made it very clear that should anything else be spilt, the Holland boys wouldn't be seeing the Hartmann boys for quite some time. Seconds later, my tomato soup mysteriously leapt out of my bowl and into my lap.
Silence. Being the oldest of the group, and very aware of the consequences of calling my mother in from the other room, I looked at the other three, slowly opened my mouth, and then began crying like a puppy.
Jeff and I didn't see Al and Ken for TWO WEEKS after that, which, in BFTs (Best Friend's Time), is about ten years. Understandably, none of us have eaten soup together since.
Curiously, it was around this time that girls began becoming interested in Al (I'm pretty sure the tomato soup incident had nothing to do with this). I distinctly remember roller-skating one summer afternoon with Al, Jeff and Ken, and noticing how all the cute girls were constantly asking Al to "slow-skate" with them.
Not that he wanted this to happen. It just did. Kind of like when you wake up one morning when you're forty years old and say to yourself, "I used to throw a pretty mean fastball, now, I just throw out my back." You don't ask for these things to happen. They just do. And your life is never quite the same afterwards.
Four years after they broke up, the Gods smiled kindly on Al and Katie, and they got back together. And things were better than ever. Last summer, when Al, Jeff and I took off for Europe during the month of June, it became very evident that it was only a matter of time before Al was going to ask Katie the big question. It wasn't so much what he said to us as we hopped from country to country, it was the way in which every time that Jeff and I went to buy a large bar of chocolate, Al would go to call Katie. And let's just say Jeff and I ate a helluva' lot of chocolate bars during that trip. Al's still paying off his phone bill and hasn't a clue what Swiss chocolate tastes like.
Now, a year later, I live in Queens, twenty minutes away from Al. Jeff and Ken are moving to South Carolina next month to begin work at a golf resort. Things are very much like they've always been, really, with one exception. About two months ago, I returned home to find a message from Al on my answering machine.
"...Just wanted to tell you, Pat, that uh ... I asked Katie to marry me last night ... and she said yes."
I don't know how long I stood there, frozen -- as long as it takes for 20 years of great memories with a best friend to pass through your head, I guess. When I finally sat down, I realized it would never be just the four of us again no more "Big Guys" and "Little Guys." No more races in the woods. No more spilt tomato soup. It would now, always, be the five of us.
And I, for one, couldn't be happier. After all, Al's found exactly what he's been looking for all along. You see, besides her wonderful personality and fine looks, Katie's quite capable of throwing a baseball in a perfectly straight line.
Outquote:
I shared my childhood with Al, his brother Ken, and my brother, Jeff. We weren't exactly the brightest group of guys when we got together, as the "Hey, let's see what happens when we throw heavy rocks at our large living room window" incident would attest, but we were often the happiest.
Patrick Holland hopes to find his Katie some day. In the meantime, he'll just continue helping old ladies across busy highways, stopping them halfway across to demand the names and phone numbers of their granddaughters.