I wear this necklace every day of my life.
For those that know me, I’m not really an “accessory guy.” I
could never picture myself getting an
earring, for example. Though many in both my immediate family and extended
family, especially on my mom’s side, have some tats, and though to be honest, I
think some are pretty damn cool, I’ve never really considered getting any ink.
I can’t think of anything permanent that I’d really want on my body badly
enough. I never even ordered a class ring in high school or college. Never saw
the need; I knew I wouldn’t wear it. On very, very rare occasions, I suppose I
do wear a watch, but even that is pretty much only to a wedding, and at that,
only when I remember. (Side note: I can never remember.) I think it’s been well
over a year since I last wore my one and only watch. I can’t really even
picture myself wearing a simple wedding ring. I can tell you right now, too,
that I won’t ever wear another necklace other than this one.
But I wear it every day. All day, I never take it off. It’s
nothing fancy. Just a thin, silver, 10-, or maybe 12-inch chain, with a single
tiny silver four leaf clover charm on the end. I think the charm cost about $5
at Kmart, yet it’s priceless to me. Most of the time I don’t even notice it
anymore to be perfectly honest, it’s as much a part of me as my neck is at this
point. Even for those of you who’ve known me through running, or through work,
or many other things where I typically wear a shirt (I guess that’s most of the
time in general in a city like Boston where shirts are quite necessary at
minimum for 6 months of the year), or even some of you who’ve known me for
years otherwise may not even realize I wear it. It’s pretty much always under a
shirt unless I’m either running, and it’s getting jostled around, or I’m
playing with it absent-mindedly. I don’t really notice most of the time when I
do that either. Even if you did notice, it probably didn’t necessarily occur to
you to ask why. Maybe you thought I was Irish (I’m not). Maybe you thought that
was my necklace choice of the day, and I have several to choose from (I don’t).
Maybe you didn’t care (I don’t blame you, I don’t typically ask anyone about
their own necklaces, mostly they’re just accessories). Maybe you thought I was
a townie and I’m just trashy like that (ok, I sort of am at this point, being
about an 8-year Somervillian).
I’ve worn it so long that I can count the number of times
it’s been off my neck on one hand since I started wearing it consistently
around 2003 or so, and I can specifically
tell you the last time it was off my neck, since that’s FAR more noticeable to
me than when it’s on.
It was May of 2010. Admittedly, I do have to look up the
exact day, being on vacation in Las Vegas at the time, but I know for a fact
that it was the morning after Roy Halladay pitched the 20th perfect
game in Major League Baseball history. That was quite memorable to me at the
time too, since he was on my fantasy baseball team – on my bench! Sue me….again,
I was on vacation…I made up for it by winning that season and riding my Boy Roy
the rest of the season to victory, so no harm, no foul. I woke up on that
particular morning at 10am Vegas time, 7am back home, and literally the first
thing I did was text my roommate back home to ask him if I did indeed to what I
had dreaded, and benched him by accident. This was before I had apps for such
major first-world problems. My roommate confirmed the bad news. Benched. Shoot!
So, carrying a MASSIVE, well-deserved hangover into the bathroom to try to get ready
for day 3 of 5 of vacation (far too long for Vegas, by the way), I had only
made it roughly 30 seconds from bed to the bathroom before I clawed at my neck,
realizing almost immediately something felt very wrong. I felt naked. I
PANICKED that (mom, stop reading for a minute) a stripper named “Pink” at the Rhino Club had expertly lifted it
off me while….entertaining me (ok mom, keep reading) as I watched ESPN highlights from a lounge chair
of Halladay’s strikeouts and perfectly induced grounders, over and over again.
In retrospect, that was very unfair of me to judge her like that just because
of her choice in profession, she was a perfectly nice young lady. And, as it
turned out, after ripping apart the hotel room for a few minutes, I found the
necklace under my pillow, the clasp to the chain slightly bent out of shape,
allowing it to slip off in my sleep.
Again, no harm, no foul though. I bent the clasp back in
shape, put it back on, and felt human again. Then the first thing I did upon
returning from Vegas was call my sister, who worked at a jewelry store back
home, to get a new, sturdier chain, with a more fool-proof clasp. Ever since
then, about late spring/early summer of 2010, it’s literally been a part of me.
I can’t describe the sheer panic of missing it for that 5-10 minute stretch,
though.
This kind of thing had happened before, the most memorable
time I can think of being in college as a freshman at Delaware in 2004, losing
it at my roommates’ girlfriend’s dorm room, and panicking so bad that time that
I was in tears until someone found it for me. I remember my roommate, the next
day, asking me if I was in tears that night because I was a tad tipsy, and
over-reacted a bit.
“Yes,” I lied. That wasn’t at all the case.
So why does simple little necklace mean so much to me? Well,
like most of my blog posts, including this one so far, it’s a long story.
I think it all started around 1990 or so. I don’t remember
when my family moved to Peterborough, a small town in the Monadnock Region of
Southern New Hampshire, I don’t even know if I was 2 years old yet at that
point – this would have been 1988 or so when we moved. But I definitely DO
remember this time in 1990 or so, meeting Tommy Alexander.
We lived on a quiet cul-de-sac in our quiet town, our houses
maybe 100 yards apart through the woods, so as our parents did yard work at
their respective houses one summer afternoon, Tommy and I slowly gravitated
towards each other. I don’t even remember saying “hello,” or “want to play with
me?” as a normal 4 year old might. I just remember somehow we decided to fight.
Naturally, being boys. We stripped the leaves off of tall weeds and “sword
fought” with our makeshift weapons for what I seem to remember as hours on end.
We would break our switches on each other over and over again (relax, we didn’t
hit as hard as Adrian Peterson), and call truces and time outs to search for
sturdier grass. We were at least respectful opponents. Then we’d get right back
to it, whipping each other as best we could, making sound effects for a more
‘real’ feel to our little spats, until we got called in for dinner. We left
each other that evening, but little did we know, from that point on throughout
childhood, we’d become inseparable.
This wasn’t really a normal friendship by a 4 year old’s
typical standards, though. Tommy was 3 ½ years older than me, a full three
grades ahead, so though I hadn’t even entered 1st grade yet, he was
already almost in second, and if I’m remembering all this correctly, nearly 8
at the time. We should have both had other friends our age – and probably did –
but not like each other. And it’s not like there weren’t other kids in the neighborhood
or even on our cul-de-sac. I think each of the 5 houses, at one point or
another over the next 5-10 years, either had other kids my age, his age, or
somewhere in between. Down the street on Lounsbury Lane where we lived, there
were plenty more. In the larger neighborhood, Pineridge, even more (see the
handy and very artistic map I drew for their locations). And, of course, once
school started for both of us, plenty of kids in our respective grades to hang
out and play with. They just weren’t as fun as us.
We did everything together over the next 10+ years. Normal
kid stuff I guess, all of it, but the kind of stuff that’s just not nearly as
fun when you don’t do it with your best friend. During the fall, we’d help each
other with yard work and chores, not really because we wanted to help each
other, per se, but so the other would be done faster and be able to go do
something more interesting. During the winter, we’d pray for snow days during
school so we could build snow forts, walls around our forts to keep the other
kids out, throw snowballs at them. We were CONVINCED that if there were a
professional sledding league, we’d be in it. The hills at the middle and high
schools were massive, and we took pride in building bigger jumps than the other
kids, starting higher on the hills, and racing faster down them. When we had
ice storms, the hills were that much faster, and the jumps that much higher.
The summers, though! Those were the best. We would, every
year at some point, try to re-create our sword game. We had, between us,
literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of those little green army men (like the
ones in Toy Story), and would spend hours setting up battles on rainy days,
then – predictably – minutes knocking them all down just to start again from scratch.
We had GI Joes. Ninja Turtles. Legos. Lincoln Logs. All manners of cheap
plastic toys. We had super soakers. Water balloons. We would build EPIC forts
in the woods around our houses. Sometimes several rooms, sometimes even several
stories. I think I hit my civil engineering peak at about 10 years old with
Tommy. Sometimes we’d have to destroy a whole fort (if the location was prime)
just to build a bigger, better one in its place. Some were expertly camouflaged
in bushes so we could spy on our sisters if they ever came looking for us. That
was just one more thing Tommy and I had in common to bond over – older sisters,
aka mortal enemies to young boys. We’d go to Wheeler’s, a little convenience
store down the street, for maybe a comic book, Italian ice, ring pops, and of
COURSE, Big League Chew. Grape. The
*only* kind, that is. We’d have sleepovers as often as possible, which again
since our houses were next door to each other, was constantly. We’d spend those
watching the same movies over and over again: Hoosiers, Jurassic Park, all the
Disney Classics, Robin Hood (Men in Tights, sure, to change it up, but Prince
of Thieves was our go-to), Hook, Above the Rim, all the Star Wars movies (4-6),
Indiana Jones…to name a few. We’d do these same things OVER and OVER again, and
they never got old.
We’d call each other every day, too, to set up these
hangouts and sleepovers, despite the proximity to each other anyways. There
were woods between the houses, so you couldn’t necessarily see one house from
the other, but with about a 30 foot walk to the end of the driveway you could
always tell if the other was home. And if not, we had a pretty good radar for
the other family’s car. His dad’s white intrepid, the family minivan, my
family’s station wagons over the years, my dad’s Jetta or Beetle. Many times,
one of us would get home, and pretty much just walk over to the phone and wait
about 10 seconds. Most of the time, it rang right on cue. Other times, there
would often be a single blinking message on the machine. The same thing every
time.
“Hey Ed, It’s Tom. Call me when you get home. Bye.” This
message, WITHOUT variation by the way, was left countless times on each other’s
answering machine. Just change the order of the names to figure out what
message I left on his machine. We did it so many times, that in fact, one time
my family got home and listened to that single message, and started dying
laughing immediately. “Hey Tom, it’s Ed. Call me when you get- er….I mean….”
*click*. I don’t blame him. Sometimes I think our own parents would have mixed
us up at times.
By far, the worst part of summer would be when my sister and
I visited our grandparents and extended family in Iowa. Not because I didn’t
like Iowa – on the contrary, my friends would probably tell you I have sort of
an unhealthy love of the state, and especially the University of Iowa’s
football team. (That isn’t at all true by the way, my love is PERFECTLY normal
by Iowa standards.) No – the reason this was the worst part of summer is that,
for a minimum of 3 weeks, up to about 2 months per year, from the time I was
born until I entered High School, I was ripped away from my best friend and our
endless adventures at the best possible time for adventures and adventuring. It
was probably even worse on Tommy. Whenever I talked to my parents during Iowa
trips, my mom would tell me how he was asking when I would get home again. A
couple summers, my parents would decide life without kids was so great, they’d
ask my grandparents to extend their break a week or two longer. My
grandparents, of course, were only too happy to do this – Tommy and I hated it.
But in addition to *just* a best friend, he was so much more
than that. My parents would often joke that my “brother” called when I was out,
and in every sense of the word other than blood, he was absolutely that. He
ragged on me as any older brother would, but he also stood up for me if anyone
else tried to do the same. He was the one who didn’t just help me learn how to play baseball, or basketball, or
any other sports or activities, but who told me (not explicitly, of course), that it was cool. I wanted to be Michael
Jordan because Tommy wanted to be Michael Jordan. One time, Tommy told me the
story of Jordan picking his famous #23 as a high schooler. The story as Tom
told it was that Michael’s older brother Larry already had #45, his favorite
number (perhaps, in my mind, because he looked up to his older brother), so
because Michael wanted to be half as good as him, he selected 23. Whether or
not that’s exactly the real reason has never mattered to me. When I started
playing youth basketball, I always chose number 10 or 11 when I could. Because Tommy
was always 21. He was the older brother I looked up to. Always bigger,
stronger, faster, funnier, smarter, all the things anyone’s older brother was
when they were young.
So that’s what made a totally normal and random day in 2004
so difficult for me. Tommy was in college then, a freshman at UNH, and me a
sophomore in high school. He was on his first break coming back home from
college, which was exciting for me since obviously there wasn’t as much time
for us to hang out those days. I went to work as usual that day, and being
about 15 years old, my mom picked me up and drove me home. She mentioned there had
been an ambulance in front of Tommy’s house when she had left, so on the ride
home we speculated what it may be for. Tommy’s grandmother lived in the
neighborhood as well and often visited for dinner, so we assumed it was likely
for her, and hoped for the best until we knew more. The next day, though, we
found out it was for Tommy, and my world was turned on its head.
Again, it was a totally innocuous story, about a totally
normal day. Tommy had been playing basketball before he came home for the
weekend, and shared a water bottle with a friend. The next day, while home, he
felt sick and laid down to rest. Just a few hours later, he was too weak to
lift his head, and was rushed to the hospital. From our local hospital, he
would be transferred to UMass Worcester, and diagnosed with bacterial
meningitis. Over the next several weeks, it only got worse. He suffered a
stroke, and was in a coma for the better part of 3 weeks. For a while, doctors
were uncertain if he would wake up. When he finally did, he would never quite
be the same. Weeks of being in a coma resulted in some muscle atrophies, and I
had never seen him so skinny in my entire life. The stroke cost him motor
function on his right side, and left him with cognitive difficulties including
aphasia and a loss of speech for a while, among other difficulties.
And at 15, I just couldn’t comprehend what was happening.
This was my hero. Made of steel, or better yet, adamantium, if not totally invincible.
How could my hero be reduced in this way to a hospital bed at just 18 years
old? For doing nothing wrong other than share a water bottle? Something he, and
I, and probably you, have done a thousand times without a second thought? Why
him? Why anyone, really? What deed had he done, or could anyone do, to deserve
that fate? Those questions would be in my head for weeks and weeks on end. And
there were no answers. Nothing ‘logical’, at least. He was essentially just in the
wrong place at the wrong time and a cruel twist of fate ripped his youth and
strength away in a single swoop.
It’s not that dissimilar from the way another hero of mine,
Martin Richard, suffered an equally unfair fate for an equally benign and
normal thing. There are no ‘reasons’ that can justify why those things happened
to those people at those times. It’s a sad but humbling reminder that, no
matter who you are, how good of a person, or how normal of a day you think it
is, nothing in life should be taken for granted. Like Tommy, after 2004, I don’t
think I was ever the same. But the way I chose to honor the impact that he had
on my life was pretty similar to what I had always done whenever I would try to
follow in his literal or figurative footsteps as a kid: be as much like Tommy
as I could. And the only piece of jewelry or accessory I had ever seen him wear was
just a thin, silver, 10-, or maybe 12-inch chain, with a single tiny silver
four leaf clover charm on the end.
So from then on, right up until today, and tomorrow, and next
week, until it’s physically ripped off my neck (good luck):
I wear this necklace every day of my life.
