It was a late summer day. The weather was still nice and hot out. The sky was clear and there was a slight breeze blowing through. Dad had just mowed, and it smelled like freshly cut grass. Our parents called my best buddy, Jay, and me, “JJ” because we had been best friends since we were about 1 year old. We were now 9. We were playing baseball in my backyard…
“Alright, give me a one more good one,” shouted Jay, with his sweaty shirt.
I threw him one right down the middle of the plate when, POW! The ball went soaring over the garage.
“Home run!” We both shouted.
He trotted around the bases, and we decided to go in to the house for some lemonade and cookies. But when we got to the door, we saw a moving van parked across the street. Out stepped a boy about our age. He had dark, short hair and he looked really nice.
“Hi!” I yelled to him.
He looked at me for a little bit, and then replied, “Hi.” And he turned around to walk into his new home.
“Wait! What’s your name?” I shouted to him.
He turned to me, “Tony.”
“Cool, I’m Jake and this is Jay. Jay smiled to him. “Well I guess we’ll see you around.”
“Yeah,” answered Tony, and he walked into his house.
Little did I know but this was going to be the best experience of my entire life.
It was now May and 6th grade was coming to a close. All three of us couldn’t wait until it was over so we could get away from all the “little kids” in the elementary school. We weren’t called “JJ” anymore because Tony moved here. Now, we were just, “the kids.” We did everything together. We even brought each other on our families’ family vacations that we went on in the summer. But this summer was going to be different because it was our last chance to do fun things before we had to be “cool” in the high school.
But one day, Jay and I were over at Tony’s house and his mom and dad told him they needed to talk to him about something very serious.
“Tony, we know this is going to be hard for you to hear, but there is no easy way to put it,” said his mom. “Your dad got a job in Florida—“,”NO!” Tony interrupted, his eyes starting to water. “We can’t leave. Dad is always forcing me to leave my friends just because of his job.”
“Tony, we have no choice,” his dad told him.
Tony then went and threw himself onto his bed.
So his mom left him and told us that we should probably just head back home for the night.
“I wonder what happened to Tony in there?” asked Jay.
“I don’t know but I’m guessing it wasn’t good.”
When my mom came to say good night to me, I told her about Tony. She said the best thing I could do was to just pray about it. So I did, but about half way through, I was sound asleep.
The next morning, Tony called.
“Hello?”
“Hi, this is Tony.” He sounded tired, sad, and gloomy.
“I have something I have to tell you and Jay. Can you two meet me at the fort in about 15 minutes?”
“Yeah sure, we’ll be right out there.”
“OK, bye,” Tony hung up.
I just thought for a little bit and then called Jay.
Our fort was in the middle of a grove about a mile away from our houses. So we made our way out there and found Tony in the fort.
“Hey guys,” he said gloomily.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“Well, I don’t know how to start, so I’ll just get right to it.” He took a deep breath and said, “I’m moving to Florida,” he explained as he looked at the ground.
“What!?” Jay and I answered.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought when I heard it from my mom.”
I was absolutely devastated. One of my two best friends was moving half way across the country.
Trying to brighten the spirits a little bit, I said, “Hey, why don’t we make a list of the things to do before you have to leave. You know, kind of like a bucket list!”
“Hey, I like the sound of that!” Jay chimed in.
“Let’s do it,” Tony agreed.
I said, “OK, let’s start.”
Tony gave me his pocketknife to carve the list into a tree in our fort.
“Number one…”
“How about we go on a sailboat to the little island out there and just hang around on the beach and stuff,” Tony requested.
Jay excitedly replied, “Yeah, I’ve always wanted to see what’s out there.”
“OK, number…one: go…on…one…of…those…big…ships.” I said out loud as I carved it into the tree.
“Number two… let’s go to the shoreline and try swimming around for as long as we can. The one who can stay under the water the longest wins,” Jay requested.
“I don’t know,” Tony said, “that sounds kind of dangerous.”
“That’s the point of the things we’re doing this summer!” I added.
“Number three.”
“Let’s go to a Brewers game some time and sit in the first row,” Jay dreamed sarcastically.
Tony and I both agreed with him. So it was now number three.
“Number four…”
I said, “How about go camping in the woods by ourselves for a whole night.”
“OK,” they both said simultaneously.
So for number four, we were going camping.
“And then number five. Let’s just start with five and go from there.”
Right away, Tony said, “Let’s go fishing in the river that’s in the woods. We can go camping right by the river and go fishing from there.”
“Well…” Jay said.
Tony replied, “Come on…”
“OK.”
Now we were going fishing for the 5th thing on our list.
School ended a couple of days after that and we were off to our list.
We got the chance to do the first thing almost right away. There was a little sailboat waiting for us that our parents had paid for. Just for us three and a captain dressed in a blue suit. We were just messing around and hanging out in the bottom of the boat when the captain told us to come up top. We went up there and he showed us around the command board and all the controls. We went to the side of the boat to look over the edge at the water. Tony wasn’t felling very well though when all of the sudden, he “lost his lunch,” maybe even breakfast. So we decided that we should probably go home.
“Well, that was fun!” I said to Tony and Jay.
“Yeah, just ‘cause you didn’t throw up,” Tony told me.
“I had fun, but I feel sorry for you, Tony,” added Jay.
Tony smirked, “Gee thanks,” and grinned.
We got to number two in early July when the water was actually above freezing. It was still freezing cold! There were seagulls everywhere, one even came down and took a piece of my pizza. The water felt good for a couple of seconds because it was like 95 degrees out.
“My shoulder really hurt, am I sunburnt?” Jay asked as he took off his shirt.
“Oh yeah,” Tony and I said.
“It’s a good thing we brought drinks along, otherwise I would have thought about drinking the lake water because it was so clean and clear,” Tony said as he pulled out his water bottle.
We had an absolute blast!
Number three was in late July when we went to a Brewers game. They were playing against the Twins. It was an awesome, intense game. We even caught a foul ball hit by Joe Mauer; too bad it wasn’t Prince Fielder, the Brewers best player. Either way, we had lots of fun eating hot dogs and drinking pop. The only bad part was that the Twins won 7-6 in 11 innings.
“Those two homers by Fielder were monster homers!” exclaimed Tony after the game.
I said, “Yeah, that was an awesome choice to put this on the list.”
“Definitely,” Jay commented.
“Definitely,” Jay commented.
Number four was going to be a little harder to pull off. We eventually set a date for August 3 and 4. August 2 came and went. For lunch on the 3rd, we had Tony’s mom make us “Tony’s” pizza for lunch. After lunch, we gathered our stuff and headed for the forest to complete numbers four and five. We got there, set up camp and went in our tent to go to sleep. It was a cool night, crickets chirping, dew forming on the tent, and the feeling of cool, fresh air. So we talked about some things just before we went to sleep.
“You know Tony, I’m so glad that you moved here,” I said to him.
“I know, me too. Remember the first time we saw each other, we were so little,” Tony laughed as I laughed with him.
Jay said, “I’m also really glad we came up with this idea of doing these things before you’re gone.”
“Well, good night.”
“Good night.”
“Good night,” we all said to each other.
“Good night.”
“Good night,” we all said to each other.
I looked over at Tony and wondered what he’d be like in 10 years, who knows; maybe we would keep in touch. At that, I fell asleep.
When I woke up, Tony and Jay were staring right at me.
“Whoa,” I yelled.
Tony and Jay just laughed.
“Ha ha, very funny,” I sarcastically remarked.
We then ate breakfast and decided to do number five on our list, go fishing.
So we got the boat, the fishing rods and lines ready and headed out. We had gotten to where the fish would most likely be biting and anchored the little wooden boat. I was on the left, Tony on the right, and Jay in the front. I was pulling in fish by fish. Jay had a couple, and Tony had about two or three. Finally Tony decided to come over to my side to try and fish, but I told him not to.
“Tony, stay over there, the boat’s going to tip over.”
“No it won’t.” And he came over.
Jay yelled, ”No!”
But it was too late. The boat was already upside down. We all grabbed the boat and held on for dear life.
“Hang on, DON”T LET GO!!” I told them.
Tony started to slip and that was all it took. He slipped off, also knocking off Jay from his grip. The next thing I knew, they were both headed down the rushing river.
“NO!!” I yelled.
All I heard were faint cries for help.
I rushed to get the boat back to the side and run back to our camp. When I got there, I called my parents and they called 911. So there was now a huge search going on for them. I felt as sick as I had ever felt.
…On the sixth of August, my mom pulled me aside to tell me something. I knew that I wasn’t going to want to hear it.
“Jake… they found your friends.”
“Are they OK?”
She sighed and then paused, “They’re gone.”
Struck to the deepest deep, my knees buckled and I fell to my knees on the floor. I didn’t know what to say, they were my absolute best friends. I just sat there, thinking, of really nothing except that they were actually gone.
My mom sympathized, “I’m so sorry, I know how much they meant to you.”
It had all happened so fast. One second, they were in the boat and we were having a good time fishing. The next, they were out of sight down the river. I just still couldn’t get over the fact that they were gone, forever.
I didn’t know what I was going to do for the rest of my childhood, junior high. Oh my, how was I ever going to get through junior high without my two best friends? High school would be the same way. We still had our fort in the grove that I could go hang out at, but with nobody. I had put the baseball, which we caught at the game in a display case on a table in the fort, only now it had a Prince Fielder autograph on it. It had a note just from Prince Fielder himself: “In memory of Tony and Jay, the two best friends you could have.” Which was then followed with an autograph.
…So I was feeling all down and sad still, even about a year after. I know, people say that you just have to move on, but it was so incredibly hard to just forget about it.
But one day, I was in my backyard, on a hot summer day, hitting a baseball over my garage. I hit one over the garage to go get it. When I got around the garage, there was a moving van in front of the house across the street. Out stepped a boy who looked about my age. I remembered what my mom had said, ‘you should try to make some new friends; you’ll never make it through school with no friends.’ So…
“Hey,” I shouted.
“Hi,” he yelled back to me.
I said to him, “What’s your name?”
He looked at me and said, “Jay.”
He looked at me and said, “Jay.”
“Cool,” I paused, “I’m Jake.”
