Not Charlie

When each biennial Roundup of the Usual Suspects is winding down, we agree on a location for the next reunion, and someone takes responsibility for scouting out locations and making arrangements.

In our minds, we Usual Suspects are still the four young couples that we were in the mid-1960s when our friendships formed in St. Petersburg, Fla. Photos from the ‘60s, from our first reunion in 1994, and the most recent one last year, however, would reveal the irresistible tug of time and gravity.

It has been a long journey

Just getting accustomed to being adults and too poor to be pretentious, we were friends simply because we liked each other. We are friends now because we still like each other.

We could have missed knowing that, though, except for a lunchtime conversation.

Jean and Charlie had remained in St. Petersburg, and Tom and Shirley lived in Clearwater. The two couples did not see each other often, but Jean and Tom both worked in downtown St. Petersburg and often lunched in the same place.

By then Chuck and Leanne and Adelaide and I had long been gone from St Petersburg. They were settled in Claremont, Calif., and we lived in Montgomery, Ala.

One day at lunch, Jean suggested that the four couples have a reunion at the house Tom and Shirley had built in the mountains of Colorado in anticipation of retirement.

I think curiosity impelled all of us to attend that first reunion, and we approached it with questions and a certain amount of trepidation. Within minutes of the last couple’s arrival, the intervening years were swept away, and the Usual Suspects were born.

We agreed that meeting every other year would keep the reunions from becoming a duty, and the schedule gave us something to look forward to. The primary site specification was that there be room for all of us to hang out.

If you listened to a sound track of our gatherings, you would understand why. You would hear laughter, punctuated by barbs that would make you wonder how the verbal combatants could possibly be friends. We are armed with sharp tongues, but we never draw blood.

Each time a Roundup of the Usual Suspects ends, we know that our numbers might be diminished before the next gathering. Mortality is a reality, and as the years pass, the horizon comes closer.

Still, in the summer of 2008 when our reunion on the Oregon coast broke up, none of us expected that the first person missing would be Charlie.

Charlie was full of life, passionate and curious and energetic. He loved corny jokes and bad puns, and he would tell them with relish, knowing that his reward would be a chorus of groans.

He loved his native St. Petersburg and the starkly beautiful Four Corners of the Southwest and the brooding mountains of Tennessee. And because he loved them, he acquired a depth of knowledge about the flora and the fauna and the people of each region.

He loved visiting rock shops, and he polished stones to decorate the exquisite wooden boxes that he crafted.

He and Jean were the perfect pair. And he was positively gaga about his grandchildren.

In all the years, we had never known Charlie to be ill with anything.

But not long after he and Jean returned home from the reunion, Charlie was diagnosed with lymphoma. Chemotherapy drove it away, and last spring Jean and Charlie and Adelaide and I spent a week in his beloved mountains celebrating his remission from lymphoma and my recovery from bypass surgery.

The lymphoma had retreated, but it had not surrendered, and it returned last summer more virulent than before.

Charlie died just before Christmas.

So early in January six of the Usual Suspects will go to St Petersburg. We will join Jean at a memorial service for her husband and our friend.

Adelaide and I will share our son’s observation upon learning of Charlie’s death: “To make a difference and to be well remembered is something everyone aspires to.”

Certainly Charlie achieved that and much more.

But knowing that does not ease the sting of his departure.

Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Good words about Good Old Boys

(I ran across this while cleaning out some old files -- more about that later -- and realized it had never been published. So here 'tis.)


    Good old boys have an image problem.
    Say good old boy and the picture that comes to mind is of an ignorant redneck with mud on his shoes and beer on his breath, an overweight hayseed whose vocabulary is smaller than his belt size, a hick in a rusty pickup truck.
    The reason for this sad state of affairs is that good old boys don’t spend their time indoors writing scripts for TV shows or drawing cartoons for slick magazines.
    It’s time someone set the record straight. It’s time to say something good about good old boys.
    A good old boy is polite to a fault. He will take time to compliment the flowers in your front yard and inquire about the health of your mammy and pappy even before he asks to use the phone to call the ambulance because his wife has gone into labor with their third child.
    A good old boy is helpful. If you have hay in the field and it’s making up to rain, he’ll show up before you call for help and he’ll stay til you’re through. In fact, if what you’re doing is more interesting than what he was doing, he’ll stay til his wife threatens to serve supper without him.
    A good old boy has perspective. He knows that a hundred years from now not much of what anyone’s doing is going to be in the history book, so if it’s a nice day and the fish are biting, it’s no big deal if the fence doesn’t get painted until tomorrow. Or the next day.
    A good old boy is an island of calm. When’s he sitting on the front porch in the rocking chair and he looks as if he’s asleep, he’s just meditating. Folks in town pay big money to their yoga teachers to learn to do that.
    A good old boy is friendly. Notice what happens when you meet one coming down the road in his pickup truck. If he doesn’t know you, he’ll lift one finger off the steering wheel. That’s short for “Hi.” If you’re another good old boy, he’ll lift two fingers. That short for “Hi, there.”
    A good old boy is not a slave to fashion. You won’t see him changing his wardrobe every year just because some dandy in Paris or New York said it’s the thing to do. He never bought a leisure suit or a Nehru jacket, and there aren’t that many different ways to tailor a pair of hog washers.
    A good old boy is a smart consumer. The cartoonists may picture him as a rube dumb enough to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, but you won’t find him paying good money just to buy drinking water that some slicker has put in a fancy bottle. Heck, you can get beer for that kind of money.
    A good old boy is a conservationist. If there’s something around the house that he doesn’t know what to do with, say an old water heater or air conditioner, he’s won’t just take it to the dump. No, he’ll toss it over the fence, because sooner or later he or one of his neighbors is going to need to scavenge something off of it to fix something else.
    A good old boy shares. You won’t find him throwing a perfectly good aluminum beer can in the garbage can. He’ll toss it in the ditch, instead, so some less fortunate soul can salvage it for recycling.
    A good old boy uses cash only if all else fails. He’d rather trade than eat, and anything he’s got is prime for barter except his kids and his hound dog. Well, the hound dog for sure.
    A good old boy knows good food. He’d eat fried dirt if you put batter on it.
    Being a good old boy is a state of mind. Even someone who has been to college, even a lawyer, can be one.
    Of course you can’t have good old boys without good old girls, but that’s a whole other subject.


Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com