Be a friend
If you feel like you don’t have any friends, you’re not looking hard enough. They are there if you look for them.
I’m very disappointed. It looks like no reunion for the Class of ’71 in 2021. This is the big one… our 50th reunion. Oh, well. I had paid dues to one of those online services that try to connect high school alums. The service was largely just a nuisance. I did not renew my subscription when it expired.
Before things started shutting down in 2020 due to COVID, I was planning to go to my alma mater’s October 2020 homecoming football game. That would be the 50th anniversary of the Class of 71’s homecoming weekend when we were seniors. However, the 2020 football season was cancelled.
Sadly, there just didn’t seem to be enough interest in 2021 for a 50th reunion. I would have really liked seeing my high school classmates… most likely for the last time… but that’s not what this story is about.
I played football all four years in high school. The fall semester was devoted to playing and the spring semester set aside for training. Players were required to participate in spring training until the final semester of their junior year. During your senior year, if you were not playing another sport, you were assigned to attend regular PE classes during that final spring semester. As you can imagine, it was difficult to take PE or any other classes seriously when you were just months away from graduation. In those days, students were required to take four years of PE. So, as a second semester senior, I was put out to pasture… in a manner of speaking… and assigned to a regular PE class with non-athletes.
As luck would have it, my PE teacher was the head football coach. He directed me to organize the class into six teams to play basketball on the school’s outdoor asphalt courts as well as set up a daily game schedule. I drafted a schedule with pencil and paper. Old school. Remember, Steve Jobs was a high school junior and Bill Gates was a sophomore in spring 1971. I devised a matrix that had teams playing a different opponent every day. Rinse and repeat the following week. Then, the coach did me a huge favor; I still don’t know today whether the favor was by chance or design. He assigned a student named Alan to my team. Alan was a special needs kid. He had great difficulty speaking and he was not very coordinated. The coach made it very clear… Alan was my responsibility.
I remember one hot spring afternoon. All six teams were playing outside. The heat was brutal. Alan would just follow me up and down the court. He knew the ball was supposed to go through the hoop, but he lacked the skill to position himself to take a shot. I turned toward Alan in the middle of the game and guided him to a spot virtually underneath our basket and told him to wait. The game was going on at the other end of the court, so I ran down to our opponents’ basket and joined my teammates. With Alan still standing under our basket, we got a defensive rebound.
My team made a break to our basket. We spread out and a teammate took a shot but missed. I snagged the offensive rebound. I leaned toward Alan and handed him the ball. He pushed the ball skyward and released it. The ball went straight up about eight feet then fell straight down… total air ball. Then I looked over at Alan’s face. He had a smile so big it started behind one ear and finished behind the other. He was so proud that he had taken a shot. I don’t remember if we won that game. It didn’t matter. Alan won.
A week or maybe two later, Alan passed me in the hallway. He looked in my direction and that same smile came back. A classmate asked me… Who is that? I replied, “That’s Alan. He’s a buddy on my PE basketball team.” I thought to myself… zero baskets, one friend.
Lessons in friendship are lessons we teach each other.
Copyright © 2023 by Ray Fowler
Great story Ray. Encouraged to read the rest.