Johnny Boy Marketing

(Editor’s note: Welcome to Living Eulogies. All recollections are accurate in the author’s mind only. Apologies in advance to everyone who has different recollection of the same events. Send all complaints to John Stamos. Please spay and neuter your pets.)

My bus stop was a hive of activity in the early years of my education. We lived up a steep hill that a full-sized bus couldn’t safely ascend, so all the kids who lived on the road had to trudge down to the streets’ end every morning and trudge back up every afternoon.

For me, that was easy. We were the second house on the left. Some kids had to trek more than a mile.

Uphill.

Both ways.

In the snow.

At least that’s what I hear they tell their children these days.

I’m not sure if this recollection is entirely accurate, but I believe it was the start of school in fourth grade when Meredith Fine first appeared at the bus stop. I say “appeared” as if she were an angel who just POOF! came out of nowhere, and that’s pretty much how it was to me. One day, there was no Meredith. The next day, Meredith was a huge part of my childhood.

If you know Meredith from back then, you know the first thing you would notice about her was her plentiful red hair. But that’s only half of what I noticed. The other half was that she was wearing one of those totally cool satin Starter baseball jackets. That it was from the hated Mets was a bit of a bummer, but here was this really cute girl … wearing a baseball jacket!

Life changed.

I don’t know how it all started, but Meredith and I became friends. We started talking at the bus stop and loved joking around. I’m not sure the particulars around this, but I remember that we had this huge thing about the word “cheeseburger.” In fact, I used to call Meredith “My cheeseburger.” But not just “cheeseburger.” Add about 20 E’s … “cheeeeeeeeseburger.”

I was a weird kid.

When Little League season came around, there was Meredith at tryouts. Meredith wasn’t one of those girls who showed up just because their dads didn’t have boys and there was no such thing as softball in our town at the time. Meredith was good. And that made her all the more amazing to me.

Soon, we were having catches in my backyard and hers. These catches would be interrupted by long, long talks sitting in the shade on the hill by the woods to my home. Sure, we’d talk baseball, but we also just talked about life in Pound Ridge Elementary School. Then we’d go back to having a catch.

Meredith lived about a half-mile up the hill from me, and I got real good pedaling my black Huffy bike up the three separate steep hills I had to climb to get to her house. There, we’d play computer games and be annoyed by her little sister, Lauren. Her mom would make us lunch, and I always felt welcomed there.

I’m not sure a 10-year-old kid could possibly know what love is, but whatever it was that I felt for Meredith was something approximating that. I could talk to her forever and thought her NYC accent was adorable. And all that red hair! AND she loved baseball as much as I did!

At some point in fifth grade, the typical playground games we’d all played started to change. Suddenly, there was a clandestine spin-the-bottle game going on just outside the watchful eyes of the recess attendants. And one day, a game of tag took a turn when it became “If a girl tags you, you have to kiss her.”

What the frick?!?!?!

I wasn’t what anyone would call cute. I had glasses and was pretty damn goofy. But all of a sudden, Meredith was chasing me and I, for some dumb reason, was running. Despite my blazing fast white-boy running skillz, Meredith caught me (I let her … or something), and just when it was time for me to pay up, the whistle blew, which was fortunate because I was beet red from embarrassment and hadn’t a clue how I was going to actually kiss Meredith.

That non-kiss became part of the background of the friendship Meredith and I shared as middle school dawned. Sixth grade was not kind to me. Four elementary schools from different towns dumped into one middle school, and a month or two in, all the boys who’d been my friends most of my life — several since kindergarten, including my best friend — decided I wasn’t good enough to hang out with them anymore. All of a sudden, I was in a new school and friendless, dodging relentless bullying from these kids at whose homes I’d slept over and whose parents were family friends. It was miserable.

But I still had Meredith, and that made life livable.

At some point, I linked up with a kid named Craig and he, Catherine Seibert, Meredith and I started hanging out. I remember a lot of mornings before the first bell with the four of us hanging out by Meredith’s locker. Craig was crazy for Catherine in a sixth-grade way, and Meredith … well, nuff said.

I’m not sure who brought it up, but someone — probably Catherine, as she talked the most! — mentioned going to a movie on the weekend. We all agreed to ask our parents, thinking there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell it was going to happen. Phone calls flew between parents. Somehow, they agreed that this double date could happen, though they sure as hell weren’t calling it a double date. It was a “get-together.”

They could call it a freaking play date if they wanted to; I was going to be there … in the dark … with Meredith. And I still owed her that kiss!

The day came and we all met at the theater to see Gung Ho. I’m pretty sure that movie couldn’t be made today, but we thought it was hilarious. And throughout the entire thing, I had one thought: Kiss her.

Alas, it didn’t happen. Not that day. Not ever.

Meredith was a huge part of my childhood. But our school was so weird. This girl who I knew so well, who was such an important part of my life while I was growing up … by the time we were finishing up high school, we were just faces in the hall to each other. We’d walk past each other and not say a word … not even make eye contact.

It wasn’t that we had a falling out. To the best of my recollection, we just … drifted apart. At some point, she moved to a different part of the Ridge, and I no longer had a reason to ride my bike around the hill anymore. We became what so many people who meant so much to me in my childhood became: Strangers.

I look back now at age 48, and that makes me sad … probably more sad than just about anyone else I’ve lost touch with makes me sad. As I mentioned in my last Living Eulogy, it wasn’t like we never talked again. Meredith was the one who told me on MySpace about this thing called Facebook, so I know we talked at some point as adults.

In so many ways, Meredith was my childhood. I look back at the memories of sitting on the hill in my backyard and talking about baseball and baseball statistics and baseball games and why her stupid Mets were never going to be as good as the Yankees, and man … that was what being a kid was all about. It was so simple, so easy, so innocent. I’m sure we had worries back then, but they sure as hell didn’t get in the way of us being friends.

I valued that relationship. I was blessed that she lived so close to me. I appreciate that her mom was so open to having me hang around her daughter.

I’m glad I knew Meredith like I did — and, in the end, I’m glad that kiss never happened. I’m pretty sure it would have messed up something that was magical enough without it.

So let’s all raise a glass to Meredith. My bus stop buddy. My baseball buddy. My friend. Hear hear!

UP NEXT: That kid from Texas

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