Clear through the past, November 2 – The morning sun

Autumn is here, hear the cry

Back to school, ring the bell

Brand new shoes, hiking blues

Climb the fence, books and pens

I can say we are

will be friends

— The white stripes from “We’re Gonna Be Friends”

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Consider where a man’s glory most begins and ends, and say that my glory was: I had such friends

–William Butler Yeats

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When it comes to friends, I am blessed with an embarrassment of riches. At 73, I still have every good friend I ever made.

I met Greg Saunders and George Wortley in 5th grade and I still keep in touch with both of them, George, more often than Greg.

Ann VanDerwerken was my first friend. Boy, was I in love. We never broke up. I moved with my family from upstate New York to Lansing, Michigan and that was that. The last time I saw Annie we were both 14. Nowadays I still hear from her regularly.

John Pierce played rhythm guitar in a band we were in when I was 17 or 18. I still hear from John on Facebook.

There are others, but the friendship I want to talk about today is the unshakable bond between me and a man named Michael Eugene Izdebski.

I moved to Michigan at the beginning of 9th grade and visited Msgr. John W. O’Rafferty, a Catholic high school on the west side of Lansing that no longer exists.

Every year there was a different plan at O’Rafferty. In 9th grade, even though the school was co-ed, all the girls’ lockers were on one side of the building and the boys’ lockers were on the other, and we never went to class together.

This would change in the second year.

My graduating class, The Class of ’69, was divided into homerooms based on the foreign language we used.

Students with the highest scores on the entrance exam were guided towards French or Latin. Since this was supposedly easiest, a majority of the students chose Spanish and there were so many of them that they had two living rooms, one for the smart kids and one for the cavemen.

Ahem, I was in the first.

At the end of the first semester they moved some of us. My grades were good, so I was transferred to the Latin classroom, although I was still taking Spanish.

I should mention at this point that I have been an artist since I could hold a pencil. In group 9 I was good, very good.

Shortly after I moved into the Latin class room, one of the kids came up to me and said, “You’re a pretty good artist, but you should see THIS guy,” and he jerked his thumb in Mike’s direction.

I introduced myself to Mike and we hit it off from the start. We could always laugh at each other. That counted a lot.

Shortly after we met, I saw some of Mike’s work. “Damn, he’s good,” I said to myself, promising to do better. The next day I showed Mike a piece of art I had created. We were both fans of the monsters-in-hot-rods designs of Big Daddy Roth or Stanley Mouse and I brought along a faithful copy of a Mouse poster.

Mike looked at it for a moment and just nodded. Later I heard that he had said to himself, ‘Damn, he’s good, I have to do better.’

By the end of the school year, we were both doing professional artwork and had become fast friends.

It was the start of one of the greatest friendships of my life.

And so it went.

Next week: He’s a trout fisherman?

Don Negus is a Morning Sun columnist.