One Dog's Writer: Childhood Friend: Hiking with Matthew 55 years later

Saturday, October 1, 2022

Childhood Friend: Hiking with Matthew 55 years later

Matthew & Monk on Bald Mountain
As always, click on photos to enlarge.

Back then, at Joe Potvin's store, we scarfed down penny candy. Peach stones, mint juleps, Bit-O-Honey, and Atomic Fire Balls topped my list. In the 1960s Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Hersey Bars sold for just a nickel, and bottles of Pepsi Cola and Mt Zircon sodas came in at 10 cents with a 3 cent deposit. At Potvin's, bottles of soda swam in a frigid, water-fed cooler along with slender, inch-long bugs that we called cockroaches, but weren't.

I don't recall when Matthew moved out of town. We met last year on Facebook thanks to his chance meeting with Emily, a friend who with her husband owns Hope Orchards in Hope, Maine. Matthew and I have traded life stories and memories via Messenger over the past year. Yesterday, 55 years later, we met in Rockport to hike Bald Mountain, a local mountain a few minute's from Matthew's home.

The Richard family of 8 picked up and moved to New Jersey in 1967 from their Royal Avenue home in Rumford. Back then, I'm betting I didn't know New Jersey from the constellation Cassiopeia. But Matthew, I remembered. The two of us hung out at Boy Scout meetings held at the Virginia Elementary School and skied at Black Mountain where his parents managed the snack bar.

In 1967, the Kent family 7 lived a quiet, eventful year: brother Allen joined the Navy before getting drafted; he trained as a carrier pilot. In 1969, he cruised the Mediterranean on the USS Forrestal, and one day in October 1969 he crashed his F-4 Phantom due to equipment failure. He's still alive. Barbara married the wrong guy right out of college; they had 3 kids, but the marriage disintegrated. A rising junior at UMaine, Fred pursued his childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian in Maine's pre-vet program. At home on Prospect Avenue, Rob and I were in public school. Our mother was 3 years into a blood disorder diagnosis that would eventually morph into acute Leukemia and kill her; Dad lived a miserable life with heart disease, diabetes, and a back problem. During this time, with the older 3 kids out of the house, I remember serving my parents their medications and at some point, bandaging my father's stump after he lost his gangrenous leg to diabetes. During this year in junior high school, Pauline Judkins and I had side-by-side lockers. Pauline used to kick me in the leg so hard she'd make me cry. She must have had a crush on me?

I remember a local newspaper article in the mid-1990s about Matthew receiving his PhD--the article may have mentioned he had a college teaching job, too. I was teaching high school English and writing a book about my teaching practice, but boy-oh-boy, I was jealous of Matthew, my childhood friend. Earlier on in the 1990s, I applied for one of three fully-supported PhD spots in the UNH writing program, but I didn't make the cut (and shouldn't have). But the UNH bid was not a waste. I met Tom Newkirk, a professor and acquisitions editor for Heinemann Publishing. He shepherded two of my books into publication and then invited me to co-edit an anthology with him featuring America's top writing teachers. Tom's a cancer survivor. He and I still meet regularly and hike. Earlier this summer, we summited Whitecap and during the pandemic, we took on Parker Ridge to Tumbledown.

A former ski bum and Peace Corps volunteer, Matthew quit his job last year as an associate professor of Cultural Anthropology at Valdosta State University after nearly 25 years of service. He built an elegant hillside home with an ocean view. He's working on an anthropology book for popular distribution, has a wicked feisty pup named Monk who is in perpetual movement, loves the local mountains, and hopes to head to Nepal next spring.

Here's to childhood friends, ocean-side hikes, and family.