For Andy

When I was in the seventh grade the best friend I'd ever had up to that point died. I've never told his story.

I met Andy McAuley within the first few days of the sixth grade. He and his family had just moved from Jacksonville, Florida and so he was the new kid in class. I don’t remember what it was that brought us together at first. That was the year that Pogs were a big deal so maybe our first encounter was playing Pogs together during break time. I know that like me, he was not liked by the popular kids and so we may have been thrown together for that reason. Regardless of how it happened, all I remember is that it was just this connection that formed almost instantly. I remember we sat together at lunch with our other two friends, also outcasts, named William and Eric. That year for my birthday the only two people I invited to my party were Andy and Eric. I used to have a picture of it that would pop up every now and then.

That was about the time that girls started to become interesting. Andy was better with the girls than I was. He had a very natural look about him. His hair was dirty blonde and came down to his ears. His skin was always tanned and he smiled a lot. The girls always thought he was pretty. I was the better student. That was also the year that my reading addiction really started to kick in. Andy never had much patience for reading. I don’t remember much else about our time in school. What I remember most was the summer after sixth grade.

That summer it seemed like almost every night I stayed over at his house or he stayed over at mine. If it was nice enough we camped out in the back yard and if not he had bunk beds in his room. I remember we used to write on the underside of the top bunk. During the day we would scrounge up change to go to the grocery store and buy water balloons so we could have water balloon fights. We used to walk down a dirt road near his house and shoot old beer cans, bottles, and birds with our BB guns. Don’t worry, we never killed anything. We also both had slingshots and we’d play with those when we ran out of BBs but our aim was much worse with them. Sometimes we went fishing at the lake in the park. There was a lot of construction going on in our neighborhood back then so we played in the unfinished houses when the workers went home.

I loved eating dinner at his house. His mom cooked a lot and when she didn’t we just made Ramen Noodles. I loved them back then. His mom used to make French Dip sandwiches for us all the time. Those were the first, and still the best, that I’ve ever had. I don’t remember what his mom’s job was but his dad was a retired helicopter pilot. I don’t think I ever saw his dad at home that the man wasn’t taking apart some gun, cleaning it, and putting it back together. In fact, I never saw a gun at that house; I only saw pieces of them. I always thought he was a nice man but he didn’t talk much. Andy had an older sister named Carolyn. She was in the ninth grade at the time. She was also a very nice girl and I got the impression that she was also kind of a loner.

The most interesting thing about that house was the animals. I don’t remember anymore how many there were but I do remember a lot of them. They had one room that was full to bursting with bird cages full of songbirds. They all had names and I knew them all. They had a pond in the backyard with 8 turtles in it. I used to know their names too. They had two dogs, both boxers, and an iguana which I later inherited. Those things are horrible pets by the way. In the living room there lived what I could tell the prized pet of the family which was a kind of Macaw I think. This was a really excellent bird. It used to whistle the tune from the Andy Griffith Show. Whenever someone started laughing it would start laughing too. At the crack of dawn, every morning, it would start to beat it’s beak against the wall until someone came to feed it. It was incredibly loud. It was one of the smartest animals I’ve ever seen.

Towards the end of the summer his family decided to move to Nacogdoches, Texas. I can’t remember why. They left only a few weeks before the seventh grade started and we made all sorts of deals about how we’d write and we’d visit each other the next summer. We did write a few letters at first and I sent him a birthday card with twenty dollars in it. A week or two later, I’m not sure anymore how long it was, his mother called my parents and told them that Andy had died of an extremely rare blood disease. One night he woke up with bruises and didn’t know where they had come from. Not long after that he had died. I can’t imagine how his family felt when they got my birthday card for Andy in the mail.

This experience had a big impact on me surprisingly I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. Today I saw a movie that reminded me. Andy was a good friend. At a time in my life when most kids seemed to be mean just because they could get away with it we always had each other. He wasn’t perfect but neither was I. We spent the summer together. We had fun together. We got in trouble together. For one year he was as close to me as anyone, other than family, had ever been. It’s hard for a 13 year old to lose that without warning. I still wonder about his mom, dad, and sister once in awhile. His sister should be 27 or so about now. The last time I saw her she was 15. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long.

Life just doesn’t seem fair sometimes. He was a good person. I miss him.