Things in the rear-view mirror

Are not really closer than they appear

I can see Joe and his red-orange hair in my memory. In eighth grade, he gave me my first poster. It was a black and white image at a beach, accompanied by the well known “Desiderata.” The last time I saw Joe was probably about 50 years ago. I can still see him in my memory’s rear-view mirror, but he is not closer than his image appears.

Thanks to binge watching all six seasons of the television show, The Wonder Years, I have been even more curious than ever about people in my past. (I always have been so. I fell in love with the television series when I was 35 and seeing it now, 34 years later, is thought-provoking, to say the least! It looks different through the lenses of this age. The series had a profound effect on my desire to write a book about my growing-up years…a project that I am still working on.) So, I accelerated my searches of people from the “old days.”

Not everyone is as easy to find as one might think. Maybe it would be easier if I used Facebook, but I quit that habit years ago. I may need to re-start it for the book project.

Joe was one of my schoolmates in grades four through eight, as I recall. I am sure of the eight, but not as confident about the four. Because of his unique last name, I thought he would be easy to track down. Long story short, I found him in Switchboard and a business email address for him. I called the company that he worked for at about 4:57 on Friday, three minutes before “quitting time.” The woman who answered the phone seemed a bit set back by my question as to whether Joe was there.

“He died recently,” she said.

I felt sure that he was the same Joe, so I asked a simple question to confirm identity: “Did he have red hair?” You could spot Joe from a mile away because of his hair color.

“White, actually. I don’t know what it was before.”

White. Of course it was. We’re not kids in school anymore.

I am 100% sure that the Joe she was talking about is the Joe that introduced me to posters, whose father took Joe and me on a half-day road trip in a Volkswagen camper van to visit a lake where he was thinking about getting a lot and enjoyed a hamburger wrapped in hamburger-joint white paper while sitting in the van, who came by the grocery store that I worked at to tell me that he had joined the Church of the Latter Day Saints and was heading out on a mission trip. That was 50 years ago.

Funny thing about people and our memories of them: they aren’t always as close as they appear to be, but it is good that we can still “see” them.