Freddy

It’s funny how as we get older, people who meant a great deal to us in our distant youth—but whom we’ve not thought of or seen for decades—pop into our minds. This happened to me about a week ago as Anne and I were completing our daily hike. I saw a fellow in baggy pants and a blue workman shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows heading from the facilities of the park back to his car and the image of Freddy, a man I knew as a child, came full force at me. I’ve not thought of Freddy in almost 40 years. He was a childhood memory from summers at my grandparents’ house on the New Jersey Shoreline in a little town called Sea Bright—the site of my grandfather’s theater organ and Mrs. Rearman’s Chickering piano. He lived next door to my grandparents with his brother and three sisters in a sprawling, dusty green, three-story home. Freddy and his brother Willie could not have been less like one another: Freddy was slightly below-average height with wispy, sandy hair, Willie was tall with a helmet of dark hair; Freddy daily wore the garb the above-described hiker was sporting, Willie always wore a funereal black suit with white shirt and solid black tie; Freddy would walk to each of his freelance carpentry jobs wearing his tool-belt laden down with his tradesman’s implements, no matter the distance (ten miles was nothing to him), Willie never walked anywhere (he was a fr