Mitch

My first friend, Mitch, died last Friday. The last time I saw him was during a luncheon that my sister, Jackie, held at her house in June of 2023. She invited the two of us to join our third friend, Rudy. The three of us reminisced about our younger days. Our most recent bond was as widowers.

Before that, Mitch and I met at Ruth’s Celebration of Life in December of 2022. He flew to Florida to support his “best friend”. And before that, we met at Barb Coatta’s funeral in the summer of 2021. Barb was Mitch’s mother-in-law.

After Barb’s funeral he asked me to come to his condo for a visit. He was proud of the second chapter of his life and wanted to share it with me. After Sandy passed, he met Connie in the church choir. They married eighteen years ago. When we spoke of marriage, he told me he was lucky to have two wonderful women in his life.

Mitch is my oldest friend. We met in 1951 or 52 at the fire hydrant fifty feet from my driveway. He wandered around the block, and I was standing atop my usual perch, surveying the neighborhood. We met, exchanged a few words, and have been friends ever since. That’s my first official memory.

We served on Abraham Lincoln’s school safety patrol and drank hot chocolate with the other “safeties” on cold winter mornings. We went trick or treating on Halloween, rang doorbells and ran, played hide and seek and frozen tag with the neighborhood gang, and went home when the porch light turned on.

We spent our youth playing “pick-up” baseball at Kenwood Park and on organized teams. We played 8th grade football at Clara Barton Junior High. Bill Graham joined us when we rode the city bus home after Friday practices lugging our uniforms and towels with a week’s worth of sweat for our moms to wash. We bowled together on Saturday mornings, winning the youth league several times. While other teammates changed from year to year, we were the constant two. We went golfing at the Royal Oak Golf Club with borrowed clubs. We shot pool in our basement, played tennis in the street with the neighborhood kids, and “tennis ball hockey” in our driveway. Tennis ball hockey was brutal. Mitch was “all time goalie” while Bill and I battled over the ball with our hockey sticks. He fearlessly stopped shot after shot.

Since our birthdays are two days apart, we took drivers training together. We did part of our driving on the road and the rest on “the range”. We were assigned to the same car. Coach McClain was our instructor. Driving an automatic was pretty straight forward, but everyone who had never driven a stick shift jumped and bucked their way around the range. I was sitting in the back seat on the day that Mitch attempted to drive the stick for the first time. He not only jumped the car around the course, but he also jumped the curb, ran across the grassy island, and back down on the other side. I bounced around in the back like a rag doll. And then it was my turn.

We talked about life and shared our troubles. We discussed girls, girl problems, went on double dates, and cruised Woodward. He backed me up when I needed it, and I did the same. We went to Friday night football games searching for cute girls that were on our radar, and we found a few. He was my wingman, and I was his.

After high school graduation we helped coach the Edward Furniture little league team for a couple of summers. He coached first and I took third. We taught young kids how to hit, pitch, throw, and slide into home. Mr. Wiseman, the head coach, took us to a couple of Detroit Tiger baseball games as a reward for our help. During one of the games Willie Horton hit a deep fly ball to left field that was caught near the wall. I predicted that Willie would hit one out to deep left/center the next time he batted. He did. You remember little things like that when you’re with your best friend.

We played miniature golf at the new Putt Putt Golf course a few blocks from home when the proprietor offered up a challenge over the loudspeaker, “For a free game of golf, who knows how we got our name?” I thought I knew the answer, shared it with Mitch, and he said, “Go tell him.” I replied, “No, you go.” He did, and he won the free game. The answer was, “Par in golf is computed by the distance from the tee to the green plus two putts, therefore, Putt Putt.

We never fought and seldom argued. If things did get frazzled the worst he would utter was, “Ah, come-on Rob.” I used various tones of “Mitch” to get my point across. We knew when to stop and when to push forward. He was the brother that Mom and Dad never had.

Mitch entered the army in 1967. I was in my third year of college. We didn’t see much of each other after he went into the service. We were doing “our thing” in two different worlds. He started dating Sandy before he went in. Sandy and her family lived directly across the street from the fire hydrant where I first met Mitch. Small world.

I don’t recall if we spoke in person, he sent a letter, or if I received a phone call. In any case, he told me that he and Sandy were getting married, and he asked me to be his best man.

I wrote the bulk of this story in May of 2020. The “rest of the story” was posted four days later. You can look it up on my blog if you wish. It’s called The Summer of 1969. That’s when he married Sandy.

While I was honored to be his best man, the truth of the matter is, he’s always been the better man. He checked in on my parents several times over the years because he was “in the neighborhood.” He called me when he wanted to know how I was doing. The last time we spoke was October 10th. We talked for five minutes and thirty-two seconds. He checked on me following my shoulder surgery. I seldom initiated such calls.

I’m not a believer of heaven and hell, but if I’m wrong, he’s in heaven. I hope when he gets there, he finds Sandy, and they find Ruth. If the three of them hang out near a fire hydrant, I’ll find them.