Reminiscing

I remember when I was nine years old. It was mid-winters at Longhouse. I played Peach Pit for the first time, and I won for our clans. The following year I was told that I had to be at Longhouse "bright and early." So the next year I rode my bike. It was freezing outside, snowing, ice on the roads, but I showed up at Longhouse bright and early. I left my house at 6:30 in the morning. I started the game that year. It got so cold that day that I asked my great aunt, who I called Gramma Ruth, for a ride home. She had her son and her grandson with her at longhouse, but she shoved my bike in the backseat and gave me a ride home. When I got in the car she looked at my cousin and said, "Have you been sitting here the whole time? Boy, you almost became a Jacksicle." That was the day that I was introduced to Jack. That was the same day his dad said that I was the skinniest kid with the fattest face he'd ever seen and began calling me Chubby. From that day on I was Chubby and he was Jack. His name is Dave, after his dad. Why we called him Jack is a mystery to me, I was never told and I never asked. Jack was my best friend after that. The thing I liked most about talking to him was the way he laughed. He didn't laugh the way most people did, instead he laughed with his eyes. When he was amused his eyes lit up and they crinkled in the cornerr. There was no way to resist his 'contagious laughter' as Gramma Ruth called it. When Jack began high school he developed Schizophrenia. We drifted farther and farther apart. He pulled away from us and into himself. We had a lot of scares when it came to him. So many times he would be 'missing' only to turn up at Auntie Lorraine's house or Uncle Pete's door, asking if they had any Oreos. By the time we were in our late teens he didn't remember my name anymore, he would only refer to me as Chubby or Chubs, his spin on my name. In March of 2005, only four months after Gramma Ruth died, Jack was missing again. We didn't really look for him because we thought it was the same as before. He was gonna turn up at Auntie Lorraine's or Uncle Pete's looking for Oreos. After a while we realized something was wrong. We began looking for him by calling people, and going to his friends' houses, but nobody had seen him. After nearly 4 days of looking we found him. He was walking home from Niagara Falls. He had made it as far as the Lower Arch Bridge. He jumped. My mom called me while she was at work to tell me that he had died. When she told me a whole lifetime of 'Jack memories' flashed through my head. When we rollerbladed through my uncle's house and left black streaks from the back door to the front on his hardwood floors. When Jack taught me how to play hackey sack. Even the time I was trying to run away from home, and Jack walked me to Uncle Pete's house, just around the corner from my house. How hard he laughed when Steve fell in the Cayuga road ditch and couldn't get out because he kept slipping in off the loose gravel. When he got drunk at his uncle's wedding and grabbed the ass of the bride, and Wayne slapped him black and blue. But most of all how when you answered the door the first words out of his mouth were, "Do you have any Oreos?" As long as I live I will remember Jack, and his 'contagious laugh'