TV taught me that Ovaltine was the perfect food.
My Real Memoir
My First “Normal” Friend
I’ve never been normal in any rational sense of the word. But Stevie was. Heck, he had red hair and freckles. Which was as “All-American” as you could get back then. How Irish-Scottish-Viking ancestry came to be the quintessentially All-American look, I don’t know. But Stevie’s whole family had it. They were right out of an Ovaltine ad, and since Ovaltine (“fortified” chocolate milk) was the perfect food, I thought they were perfect.
Unlike my mom, Stevie’s mom stayed at home all day, gleefully mopping, dusting, making fudge and greeting her husband at the door with a martini and a tall glass of Ovaltine. And Stevie’s dad? He was a Cub Scout leader. I mean, heck, how All-American can you get?
When the fudge ran out, Stevie and I would circle the block looking for adventure. But adventure was in short supply on our block. Until one day we discovered a mysterious change at…
The House on the Corner
There were no cars, and the weeds had staged a major coup. There was a half-open window, so we peered inside. There, on the only remaining piece of furniture, a broken-down dinette table with a few rickety chairs, was a huge pile of wallets. This demanded investigation! So we climbed in through the window. Who would buy a hundred wallets, and then dump their innards on a dumpy dinette set? There were cards with the names of stores on them, and thousands of wallet photos. Mostly boring stuff. But the wallets were neato! Suddenly, we heard a car pulling up outside. So we grabbed as many billfolds as we could fold into our t-shirts, climbed out the window, and skedaddled! (Whatever happened to “skedaddling?”)
Back at Stevie’s house, we played pretend with the wallets — until Stevie’s mom spotted us. And then suddenly, just like that, we were in “so much trouble!” Why? Heck, nobody wanted them! Mommandad told me later that a group of “dangerous” crooks (as opposed to the milquetoast type) had been meeting at that house.
Stevie and I never told our parents about the car we’d heard pulling up.
After the Infamous Empty House Incident
…we were grounded. So we made up new games. Including one that Stevie invented, involving Stevie’s German Shepherd “Rinty” running full speed at me over-and-over again. Which was neato! Until the completely out-of-control Rinty collided with my face at 100 miles-per-hour, resulting in my first of several trips to the hospital.
Following the Infamous Dog Collision Incident, Mommandad refused to let me visit Stevie’s house anymore. We still spent school recesses together, but our best buddy status started to fade. Still, I’ll never forget…
My All-American friend.
Every Easter for a decade, at a church where I served, I had the privilege of leading fellow believers in my favorite variation on the traditional Easter response:
Photo by 
Jacob 
