High School Years-Chap.2 – Alan

  One of my really close friends around this time was Alan. We never really hung out regularly until around 9th grade. Our friendship started off as one of competition. We competed against each other at everything and anything. Basketball, Chess, Stratego, you name it. It was always friendly and I enjoyed hanging out with him and I believe it was mutual. But my first social interaction with him was quite different.

  I had known him for years because he was usually on the same bus to school even though he was a grade younger than me and we had a mutual friend named Darren. Darren was my best friend for years, until a kid named Tom moved into the neighborhood from Ohio. He was a nice enough guy, but was an instigator. He had a tendency to talk about people behind their back to one person, get them to join in and then tell the other person what the one person said. In the end, Tom got to hang out with us separately, and Darren and I stopped hanging out at all.

  Tom and I had decided to go to 7-11 one day and on the way we came across Alan fishing at the bridge by my house. We said hello and talked for a little bit, mostly joking about him trying to fish in this little creek and wondering if he really thought he’d catch anything. Knowing him now, I’m sure he just wanted to be alone and have some peace and quiet away from his home.

   At one point I accidentally knocked his pocket knife off of the stone rail and into the water. I felt really bad and wanted to get it back for him. The water wasn’t deep and you could see it plain as day laying there in the water. So Tom and I were devising plans on how to retrieve this knife without getting ourselves wet. First we tried using a branch to drag it out. Then we thought we could maybe hook it with extra fishing line and then we thought about throwing more rocks into the creek and walking to it. It was obvious that Alan was getting frustrated by our antics and walked across the street to the other side of the bridge to continue fishing, but that side was overgrown with trees and bushes to be ideal for fishing. We finally just gave up, took our shoes off walked in and got the knife. When we went over to hand it to him and told him that he can go back and fish on the good side. He was still visibly annoyed and deemed his fishing outing utterly futile.

    “Why bother, you guys scared away all the fish. I’m just going to go home.” and started to cross the street back to collect his tackle box and other belongings.

   I felt really guilty and walked with him offering to help him gather his things. When we got back to the other side of the street, he turned around and noticed that his fishing hook had caught one of the branches and his string was stretching across the span of the road.

  “Oh, great” he mumbled and started to reel the line up as he crossed the street. Just then a huge Buick had come rumbling down the road, caught the line with its antenna and proceeded down the street.

  The fishing rod started Reeling out at full speed while the line kept getting pulled as if Alan had just hooked the largest fish on the planet. The antenna was visibly bending all the way back. The top of Alan’s fishing pole popped off and Tom and I were just laughing uncontrollably.

  “This isn’t funny guys” Alan cried out. But it was. It was the funniest thing ever and we told him that one day he’d laugh about it. The last time I brought it up to him, he claimed no memory of it, but he may have blocked it out.

   As the car turned left around the corner, the line was snapped by a telephone pole. Alan yelled down the street “You stupid moron. Didn’t you see that your antenna’s all bent?” but the car never stopped. And I was around to let everyone know about “The one that got away”.