The day after we moved from the base into a house in Anchorage, my brother Roger asked me to help with something. As the dutiful little brother who loved that his big brother included him in all sorts of fun, I was all too eager.
“Dig through the trash for soda cans,” he said. “I need five.”
I pulled out a soup can. “Will this do?”
“No.”
I eventually dug down enough for the requisite number of soda cans, shook off the coffee grounds, remnants of last night’s spaghetti, and cigarette butts, and offered up the haul with a smile.
Roger had me rinse the cans, then removed the tops and bottoms from four, and taped them together with the fifth that he’d punched three large holes in the pull-tab end and a nail hole in the other. I watched mesmerized as he took the tube out to the deck, added some lighter fluid through the nail hole, and shook the assembly vigorously. “Gotta get the fumes going,” he said. He loaded a tennis ball in the open end and tapped the cannon on the deck until the ball had slid all the way down. “Watch this.”
With the cannon propped on the railing, he touched a BiC lighter to the nail hole. Kaboom! The tennis ball flew for miles. Well, maybe not quite that far, but it was in the air seemingly forever. “Well,” he said with a devilish grin. “Go get it.”
That was the price I had to pay for a moment of excitement, and while it was well worth it, the return was far greater. While retrieving the tennis ball, I noticed some kids about my age in the cul-de-sac behind ours. “Hey!” I shouted. “Can I come and play?”
The kids looked up and beckoned me, shouting, “Sure, come on over.”
I had met my first friends in the new neighborhood.
Back as a kid, it took just a little courage, curiosity, and desire for fun to make friends. Even after boarding school, and I was a fish out of water, I made friends.
Times change. Life happens. Breakups. Children. Careers. Eventually, people are comfortable with who they know. They’ve built routine and familiarity around themselves like a wall. Oddly enough, such is supposedly one of the symptoms of what some call boarding school syndrome. Funny that it would be so common among those who’ve never been. I wonder why that is?
There aren’t many reasons I would want to go back in time, but for friends, I would.