By Bill Fields
For decades, any time I came home, I went out to the street on a scouting mission. At 10 o’clock opposite the end of our driveway, “RICKY 67” was written on the curb in white paint. That bit of Sherwin-Williams graffiti was a stubborn remnant of childhood, and when the sun and the rain eventually erased it like chalk off a blackboard, its absence saddened me.
The boy who scrawled his name 50 years ago was one of Chuck’s older brothers. To see his mark was to be reminded of Chuck, my first best friend, who from kindergarten — if we had gone to kindergarten in that less structured period — through middle school was a frequent companion and valued confidante.
I don’t remember when Chuck and I met, only that he was always there, the boy my age in a family across the street whose ranch house had a basement and a gloriously large backyard where we played until we were tuckered out.
Chuck’s mom, a kind person who never tired of my presence, fueled us with two food groups, Kool-Aid and grilled cheese sandwiches, the sugar in the pitcher and butter in the pan in amounts still probably best not to know. We would gulp and wolf down our sustenance so we could get back to whatever we were doing. When Chuck was called in to sit down for a proper supper, he returned with the speed of an Olympic sprinter, as eager as I was for more play.
I hated sunset because that meant having to retreat to our respective homes for a night of sleep until we could reconvene. This was a year-round angst but particularly acute in summer, when the days were long and we spent so much time together it was as if I had a brother to go with my two older sisters.
Chuck was taller and more athletic than me, although when I was late in learning to ride a bicycle, he patiently let me apprentice behind his house, where I could fail in private and fall on sand instead of the shin-scraping asphalt of our avenue. He was tougher, too, owing in part to having three older brothers, and bounced back quickly from a baseball to the head after a little witch hazel. Chuck’s composure contrasted with my dramatics when his family’s dachshund bit me on the hand.
Before sports filled our time together, we spent hours in Chuck’s backyard playing in the dirt with Tonka trucks and toy soldiers under the shade of a large sycamore tree — later from which a subsequent occupant of the house fell and broke a leg — and I don’t think coal miners were more ready for a bath than we were after an afternoon of scale-model construction and maneuvers.
We shared Archie comics, Super Balls and an urge to swing an old Jimmie Fox signature bat — too heavy, but made you feel like a big-leaguer — among the sports gear stashed on Chuck’s back porch. As with any boys born in the 1950s, baseball occupied much of our time. We loved clipping out box scores (if pressed, I can probably still recite the Giants vs. Cardinals, circa 1968) and pitching a tennis ball at a garden cart propped up by the steps, the length and quality of the carom dictating hit or out.
There was plenty of batting practice as well. Only because I faced him so often in the neighborhood and he had excellent control, Chuck was the only Little League pitcher I came close to figuring out. My command wasn’t as good, and during one Braves-Dodgers game in which I was hapless on the mound, I plunked him in the back.
Chuck forgave me for that wild pitch, but before long my fast friend was my past friend — at least in terms of the tight relationship that proximity had helped nurture. Before we entered high school, circumstances caused Chuck’s family to move to another part of Moore County. We began to move in different circles and developed new buddies. I know little about Chuck’s life beyond the boyhood we shared so happily in my memory and I hope in his. PS
Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.
