Classmate Lost…

Eighth grade would be the year that I would experience losing someone who I knew. It was not a family member or anyone close to the family.

This was a wake-up call, as they say, when you realize what life is and you begin to think about what it means to be alive. The realization that their life was limited to a very brief time being here in this world became a critical thought in my maturing mind, even as a struggling teenager.

Even though my grandpa had passed many years ago, the funeral was an event that I did not experience firsthand. My mom did not let me go with her to North Carolina for the funeral because his passing occurred in spring and I was in school. Plus, it was going to be a quick trip, and I think she did not want to risk me being where I could be taken by my father. I think this was a protection move on her part.

I understand that now.

During this school year, several students were lost to tragedies. One tragedy was in the news and highly written about. It was a tragedy that could have been avoided.

I think that tragedy began my interest in architecture, not engineering. Maybe it was the fact that an old building was abandoned and should not have been. It seemed to have some historic importance that was lost, forgotten.

And now a young life was lost in this abandoned building, adding to its forgotten history.

I remember my mom telling me about the student who was my age who was tragically killed in the building collapse. And this tragedy occurred on a cold winter morning while a group of students were waiting for the bus to pick them up to go to school.

How the boys were collecting wood set up the tragedy that was to occur.

According to the information we received from the school, and the various articles in the newspaper, he was crushed when the roof of an abandoned house collapsed into the area inside the house where he and his friends were collecting little pieces of wood to build a small fire.

To keep warm, he and the other boys were whittling wood from the exposed wall framing, then building a small fire in front of the house to warm their hands. Building little fires was a common occurrence during the winter months. Sometimes tumbleweeds were burned, but they burned very quickly and didn’t provide much heat.

Over the years, students waiting for the bus had removed too much of the wood, allowing for the wall framing to give way and for the roof to collapse onto them. Several other boys were hurt but they did survive this tragedy. All the boys were around my age, so I felt the impact.

When you think about someone your age losing their life you begin to realize that maybe you need to be more careful in your decision making. What you thought was safe and what was not becomes clearer when you look back on your teenage years.

Yet we still challenged the boundaries of “safe”. And puberty didn’t help our decision-making abilities to be smart and only do safe things. We were boys doing boy stuff. And that was sometimes dangerous.

And then there was the tragedy that hit closest to my neighborhood and my friends’ group.

This tragedy occurred when one of our classmates was hit by a car while riding his bike and did not survive. Back in the late sixties, there was no safety gear to protect you when riding your bike.

Our parents always told us as kids to always look both ways when crossing the street. So, we knew the rules for walking. But when riding our bikes it was as if there were no rules except for when you crash your bike. And that was to get up and walk it off.

When we rode our bikes on the street, we were, in today’s terms, reckless. We made turns without looking. I guess we thought that anyone driving a car would look out for us when we were riding our bikes. We were always showing off, pulling wheelies to see how long we could make them last. And doing other dumb stuff.

Our bikes were the popular banana seat style with high rise handlebars in the colors of the day. Mine was red in color. And it was a Schwinn Sting-Ray. I rode my bike both on the street and on the desert trails. I had many crashes. And I recovered and walked it off as instructed.

The tragedy was announced to the student body and we were shocked, and my guess was that most of us had never experienced an event like this. Our parents already knew of his passing because he lived in another part of our community.

For me, this was a real shock because I did know him. He had even joined my neighborhood boys’ group at the creek a couple of times. He was somewhat taller than me and was beginning to develop that strong body build.

I asked my mom a lot of questions about the accident and how he could have been lost. The thought of being killed by a car just didn’t make sense.

When the day of his funeral came, much of the school attended the service. I remember the church being filled with classmates and adults. He was well liked and popular with his peers. 

I didn’t know how to feel. Attending my classmate’s funeral would be a first for me. It was surreal being there and understanding that he would no longer come to the creek or ride with us in the neighborhood.

I only attended the funeral service. I think that was enough for me at the time. I was now struggling more than ever with myself and how I looked. I think that I was reaching the height of my bad acne. Well, my hope was that my face would suddenly clear and I would become this handsome boy.

As the days and weeks passed after attending his funeral service, I became more cautious when riding my bike on the street, but I was still crazy on the desert trails where there were no cars. I loved that freedom and the adrenaline flow that accompanied the craziness.

One day I went to the creek by myself. And in his honor, I placed a sitting rock by the little pond at the creek with his name painted on it. No one was allowed to sit on it. It was his rock.

Gone too soon…

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