Half-century-plus friendship with Jocko included a weekend at the farm. Jim is at left, me in front. In the doorway, partially hidden, is our farm host John "Titzy" Nitz. Leonard "Nardholm" Sandholm is the guy in the doorway with the curly hair. That's Ivan Tos behind me. The other guy must have been a friend, too, but I don't remember his name.
There aren’t a lot of pictures of me and my best college friend, football player Jim Mraz, when we were young guys, roaming free, the farm fields, taverns, the parties.
Pretty much impossible, as we never stopped long enough for photos. We were too busy having fun and, of course, studying diligently at Iowa State University. Well, there may be mugshots someplace, but that's another issue.
We’ve been replaying those memories in many phone calls in
recent months and years. And the end result is my side aches with laughter. It’s
nice to be reminded that life really can be fun, if you give it a try.
We were young, wild, silly and – most important – we were
kind to others when we roamed wild, the guys who led others to parched-eye
dawns and lived to relish our all-night adventures over free eggs and bacon at
all-night diners and truck stops.
And, as I’ve mentioned earlier in my writings, Jim and I
were the “cooks” during hog-cutting weekend at the Nitz farm in Cherokee, Iowa.
One of our greatest adventures, though we did feel bad for the hogs.
And the world-famous Viking Fest. Someday I’ll write about
that, but it really was the best-ever party I’ve been to …. Jim and I were the
hosts. We roasted the turkeys and cooked the pheasant stew (Nardholm, who fell
to cancer a few years ago, but who I really loved) killed the birds. All Jim and I had to do was take the bird shot
out of the meat and throw it into a steaming pot on Gomez’s stove. I’ll have to tell you about Gomez some other
time. He was in charge of our dormitory, all eight
floors. He reached out to me and Jim, I think, because he thought it was better
to keep the troublemakers close. Gomez was
a helluva guy. His name was/is Ed
Norton, like Art Carney on The Honeymooners. But he looked like the patriarch
of The Addams Family.
Such a deep friendship as mine with Jim is more important than ever to me now. Stupid stuff, life etc., got in the way, sporadically, but our friendship never ceased beating in our hearts.
Jim, aka “Jocko,” as I nicknamed him 55 years ago or so, and
I both have the afflictions of old men. Some maladies worse than others. We talk about those, but we know that’s
all part of the walk of life.
I really don’t have many friends, living, at least. Too many of them, like Peter Cooper, have
checked out early. Our phone conversations, several a week for 20 years, were critical to me, and – I think – to him. His ashes are up at Spring Hill Cemetery,
where he is in the same mausoleum wall as our mutual friend, Mac Wiseman, the
great flattop guitar player who used to call me regularly from his spread out in
L.A. (Lower Antioch, in the southeastern section of Metro Nashville.)
If you read my most-recent book – Pilgrims, Pickers and
Honky-Tonk Heroes – you’ll come upon a huge lineup of my friends. Most are gone, and I miss them. You should buy the book, though. It’s
available at amazon.com and you will relish the anecdotes and quotes and
fly-on-the-wall observations.
I cherish folks like Bobby Bare, who is always there when I need a friend. My book traces that friendship for the last 52 years. Fifty-two more would be nice, but kind of unlikely. You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, as Dylan said. It'd be nice to go back on the same train that brought me here before, but time goes forward.
My other constant phone calls from the basement office I call home included a few a week with my big brother, Eric, who died a couple of months ago. I still want to call him so we can share memories only siblings have. He was the only one left who was there from the start of my 72 years. Some say, I’ll see him again someday. Hope they are right. I believe I’ll see him in my memories, at the very least, as I travel deep into the golden years his body didn't allow him to experience.
He was a big man, with a big laugh, and lot of love. Nicer than me.
I have other friends I stay in contact with, like Tom “Carpy”
Carpenter, a distinguished retired veterinarian who golfs almost every day at
the links by his desert home outside Las Vegas and goes to see Brooks & Dunn or Adele at night in the casinos. He was Jim’s roommate, and I know hanging around with us helped his
academic career. The first time he met me, I was surfing down the Hanson House hallway on an ironing board. Catch a wave, indeed. I truly was sittin' on top of the world.
Politics separates me from another great friend, though we
converse on Facebook, and we know we are there for each other.
I have a great friend, also for 50 years or so, who is in a
nursing home, fighting dementia. I see him frequently and love him. Vice versa.
But they don’t allow phones, so I have to go to the nursing home to relive our
memories. Or relive mine and try to revive his.
A lot of other guys don’t have time to return phone calls to
an old derelict in his basement, and that’s fine. O-bla-di, o-bla-da, life goes
on, bra….
More than a half-century ago, if you really wanted some fun
in Ames, Iowa, well, my friend, Jim, and I, were the ones to call. Or tag along
with and hope the police or campus security remained blissfully unaware.
The late Tony Durr, a great friend and lazy editor, long ago
told me that if you are lucky, you will have had enough true friends in your
life to fill the fingers of one hand. He assigned me mine. I assigned his.
Problem is that, if you are lucky, you will outlive most of
those fingers.
Jocko, my friend, Jim ... well, he occupies the index finger that makes me laugh, cause trouble, curse, and participate in what we called "rolling" after doing quarters at Tork's. (You had to be there, and if you were, you remember us. We were the guys in the pink-dyed long john's and bunny ears that you saw on central campus at midnight. My butt hung out slightly, because a girl named "Blondie" tore off my cotton tail. Jim and I were on our way to study at the library.)
No comments:
Post a Comment