Chapter One: Photographs & Memories

A visit with a dear friend stirs up old memories. The day reminds me why I still call the place I grew up home - not because it’s where I live now, but because it's where so much life happened before.

Welcome to Chapter One of The Stories We Tell, a nostalgic lookback on friendship, growing up, and the hopes we have of becoming heroes.

It’s The Wonder Years meets The Sandlot with sprinklings of Friday Night Lights. New stories will be published weekly. For a list of all chapters, please visit the Chapter List here: Chapter List - The Stories We Tell.

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Chapter One: Photographs & Memories, June 2023

I drove west from my house late on a Saturday morning in June. The sun beat into the rearview mirror, and I squinted looking at the road ahead. I smiled, one mixed up of nervousness and excitement, like I always do when making the ninety-minute trip back to the town I haven’t lived in for twenty years but still call home. That’s the thing about moving away, it means you have two homes - the place where you live and the place where you’re from. 

I glanced out the window. The road home hadn’t changed much in forever.

Neat, clean rows of corn starting their summer stretch lined one side of the two-lane state route. On the other, I passed an old carry-out with boards now blocking its drive-through. Behind it rose a line of maple trees, full of green for the months to come. I slowed a bit as the car ahead of me turned down a country road without lines. Up ahead a wrought-iron fence guarded the stories of a dozen headstones in a small cemetery atop a tiny hill. 

Curving around a corner, I saw tall grasses waving in the wind. They’d pushed through cracks in the pavement where a ramshackle, roadside joint once served beer with its shots.

I remembered coming home from a high school football game in a nearby town one Friday when I was young. Dad was an assistant coach for the team, then, and I got to travel to the game in a van with him and a bunch of coaches who would all later be my teachers.

The game had been tense, and the win hard-fought. As I passed the old bar, I remembered dust-covered bottles of liquor and a bartender who poured me Coca-Cola into a shot glass. How we all raised glasses to winning and they chased back whiskey with cold beers, grimaces, and then smiles. One of the younger coaches and I high-fived and knocked back another round - whiskey for him, more pop for me. 

“Remember, when we have you in school in a couple years none of this ever happened,” he said, and we laughed. 

Not far in the distance, a water tower painted purple and white stood tall. It reminded everyone on their way into town they’d just entered a place where people come first. Home—the place where I’d once run from movie theater security guards and heard my first ghost stories sitting poolside at night while Grandpa sipped Stroh’s—was close. 

Maybe that’s why it’s still home, I thought. Not because it’s where I live now, but because it’s the place where so much life happened before. 

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Ryan, one of those friends who goes back to before either of us could tie our shoes, lives just outside town. I spent a few hours finishing the reason I needed to be back that way and then swung over to his house. His family was gone till early the next morning, so we got to drinking light beer on his back patio and sweating in the sun, the heat giving us good reason to always take another sip. 

Catching up came easy, the beer tasted good, and even though it’s cliché, Jimmy Buffet sounded smooth through his speakers. We had scattered a few empties across the table when Ryan said, “We were at Mom’s the other day and found some old boxes of old photos…. a lot of old photos.”

“Oh no.”
“They kind of make me wonder…”
“What’s that?”
“How any of us were ever friends with the s**t we were up to.”
“That bad?”
“That good.” A little menace lurked behind his smile. It was the same one I’d seen him flash for almost forty years.
“Do I want to see?”
“Gonna have to,” he said and left to grab the photographs and memories. 

By the second box, we’d seen enough photos and had enough ‘pops’ to be weary travelers down nostalgia’s foggy road. Mike in a Batman suit with Spider-Man face paint. He was seven, it was Halloween, and he’d told his parents he was going to be “the best of both worlds” and they couldn’t stop him. 

B, a head and shoulders taller than all of us even then, with stirrup socks up to his knees and a face p****d off because he had to play baseball and nowhere had any pants that fit.

“He hated baseball,” Ryan said. 
“Tall m**********r couldn’t hit anything,” I said.
“And you couldn’t field.” Ryan held a photo of me with a green ball cap pulled over my eyes pouting in the corner of a dugout. 

In another, Ryan held a big aluminum baseball bat above his head. His red team shirt, two sizes too big, hung past his knees. A line of dirt ran from under the black eye paint smeared on his cheeks while batting gloves dangled loose on his hands. His smile spread big and proud. Though he stood atop home plate at one of fields where we played rec league he might as well have stood atop the world, at least the one we knew as kids. 

“Moon shot.” I said. “You cleared the fence, then the flood wall, and dropped it in the d**n river.”
“Not too bad,” Ryan said.
“Not too bad! I’d never seen someone hit a baseball that far. Cheers to you.” We clinked cans and sang along with Eddie Money and his tickets to paradise. 

A bit later, Ryan held up another photo. He slid it to me. I took a big sip and shook the remnants of a near-empty can. Ryan walked off to get more while I stared at the photo. 

Four of us together–Mike, B, Ryan, and me–standing on the edges of a football field turned to mud by the morning rain and our rubber cleats. A shiver slid down my back. I winced. Thirty years later, I still felt the cold and wet and loss of that day. 

Blood dripped off my elbow. Mike had the makings of a black eye. Ryan held a football in one arm, a scowl planted on his face. B’s head pointed down. The flags we’d worn in the game scattered near our feet. Blurry, but there in the background, a bunch of kids in other uniforms celebrated. This photo. That day. The feeling I had let down all my friends. I still hated all of it. 

Ryan snapped open two beers and set a bottle of Jim Beam on the table. The music had flipped over to November Rain, which married my mood. 

“This picture. This sad d**n song. And that bottle. You’re trying to get at me, aren’t you?” I laughed.
“You still think about it?” Ryan chuckled. 
“Too much,” I said, Jim Beam burned my throat. “Definitely way more than any fortysomething should.”
“Not like you at all,” Ryan smirked, a devil dancing in his words. “You were always so good at letting things go.”

I rolled my eyes, laughed, and looked out for a moment at the endless grass of his backyard. Lifelong friends - always good to help you remember the things you try to forget. 

“I bumped into those guys a few months back…”
“Who?” I asked.
“Justin, Chad, Jared..... all of them. Whole group was in town for something.”
“A**hats,” I said.
“Yeah, well they’d been into the booze pretty good by the time I saw them. They asked if I remembered getting our a***s kicked.”
“Bunch of can’t get over the past losers,” I said, “still talking about things from thirty years ago.”

Ryan cocked his head at me. 

“Fair point,” I said, and we laughed.
“I bought them some beers and they kept at it. Talking noise about that game.” Ryan nodded at the photo in front of me. “How we were always a bunch of sissies. About…well…about you know what. After a few minutes, I’d had enough. I grabbed a coaster from off the bar, scribbled a few numbers on it, drew a big middle finger, gave it to them, and left.”

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Here are the rules—one-handed catches only, the beer stays in one hand, and no spilling. If you spill, you drink. If you drop the pass, you drink.” Ryan said standing fifteen yards away in his driveway. I stood inside his garage. The sun had gone down, we were deep into the Beam and the beer, and we’d forgotten to eat. 

Now here's a little story I've got to tell
About three bad brothers you know so well
It started way back in history
With Adrock, MCA and me, Mike D

Our heads nodded, and we rapped along with the Beastie Boys, throwing and catching his son’s youth football with just one hand. 

I had a little horse named Paul Revere
Just me and my horsy and a quart of beer
Riding across the land, kicking up sand
Sheriff's posse's on my tail 'cause I'm in demand

At some point, I glanced at one of the garage windows and saw another photo taped to it. The same four of us stood on the same football field in the same spot on another rainy November Saturday. Dirt caked our uniforms, again, and our faces were a year older. I pulled the photo off the window and looked at the back. It had a few numbers scribbled on it. 

“Same numbers as you put on that coaster?” I smiled as I asked the question.
“Oh yeah,” Ryan said. 
“I like this photo a lot more.”
“I know,” he said. “Typical can’t get over the past loser. Still talking about things from thirty years ago.”
“Fair point,” we laughed again. 

Ryan walked into the garage and rigged up a speaker and his phone to the back of his kid’s toy four-wheeler. He turned on Country Grammar.

“Come on, let’s do some f*****g donuts in the yard.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes!”

The drive back home would hurt in the morning.