Skipping Stones With an Old Friend

by Charles C. Cole

Grayson Prairie and I were best friends in high school. He taught me to fish, to drive standard, how to roll a joint, about girls. He’d been raised as an only child by a single mother who was away from the mobile home a lot, so he’d grown up fast. He died in a car accident soon after we graduated. Life went on: military, college, job, marriage, children, divorce, marriage again, children again, divorce again.

People with whom I thought I was close said I was emotionally inaccessible. Maybe, I told them, I was just emotionally shallow. Life often felt like an open sore that never healed.

One day, Gray and I both needed a break, which happened to be on a Friday in spring when I had a biology test; Grayson convinced me to play hooky. He drove his purple Gremlin to a park in the neighboring county, which had a loud river, the spirits of Civil War battles, steep rocky trails and a small quiet pond up over a hill where he’d once taught me the fine art of skipping stones.

At the time, I had a corny mass-produced print by Paul Detlefsen hanging on my bedroom wall, a gift from my grandparents, where a boy and girl hang out alone at an old mill. Think of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher on a picnic, the prim girl with tight pigtails standing Catholic-school straight and both hands around a bouquet of wildflowers while the boy skips stones.

I kid you not: the next time I saw that image, it was hanging in the mess hall at Lackland Air Force Base when I was there for what’s generously called Basic Training.

The point is that image and that very real pond meant something to me. One day, after a nasty yelling match with my first ex-wife over the risky behavior of our second daughter, which apparently I wasn’t doing enough about, I called out sick and drove to the county park and walked over the hill to the pond.

I was alone. It was early spring, a bit nippy. In another month or so, schools would be shipping their entire student body this way as a reward to everyone for almost making it through the year without a bomb threat or lockdown. I wanted to skip stones, but there were none to be found. I stubbornly and foolishly and unsuccessfully tried a quarter. That’s when this biscuit-sized blurry object came flying up from behind me, zooming about ankle-high, and tap-danced eight times over the still watery surface before disappearing to the bottom.

I turned. It was Gray, still a teen, vividly real as hot morning coffee.

“I still got it,” he said.

“I’m having a nervous breakdown,” I said.

“Get over yourself. This isn’t about you.”

“You’re dead.”

“You’re old.”

“Are you real?” I asked. He sidled up to me and sucker-punched me hard in the right shoulder the way he used to, in high school. I hated it then. Today was no better. I winced. “Damn.”

“Hurts, don’t it? Any more questions?”

“Are you back?”

“I got an hour.”

“Explain.”

“You know when there’s a class-action lawsuit with tens of thousands of people and they all win but they only end up getting, like, a couple of hundred dollars each in restitution? It’s like that. God is fair but, I’ll bet, even if he had the best meal of his long life with the most attentive server, he’d still only tip fifteen percent. I got an hour.”

“And you came here?”

“I liked it here. You were here. I was not about to visit my mom and make her cry all over again when I had to leave. She’s never forgiven me the first time. The other guy ran a red light; that was not my fault.”

“Dude,” I said, “you’re real. And you look exactly the same, the kind of boy I warn my daughters about.”

“On the other hand,” said Gray, “time has not been kind to you.”

“Blame forty more years of making questionable choices.”

Gray glanced around. He liked what he saw. “Looks the same. You played hooky and, like a boomerang, you came back to our old haunt. I taught you to play hooky. Good boy, you’re welcome.”

“You taught me how to skip stones, too. And I still suck at it.”

“You’re an embarrassment: you threw a quarter. This is not a wishing well. What would you wish for anyway? You got a hot car, cool clothes, money in the bank.”

“Spoken like a perennial teen,” I said.

“So, sue me for being frozen in the time of my glamourous pubescent awakening. In my heart, I’m still a kid.”

“Me, too.”

“Only I didn’t have to endure the psychological beatdown of two excruciating divorces,” added Gray. “Sorry I wasn’t there for you. But you made it through, ‘scathed’ but not too scarred.”

“God knows I’m not perfect.”

“Dude, time is ticking, and we’ve done enough whining about the old days.”

He looked so shiny, so unchanged by time, crisp. “It’s good to see you. Thanks for making me feel like I mattered. I’m touched, seriously.”

“I know,” he said. “Enjoy it, but don’t overthink it. I’ve got less than an hour. I am going to teach you everything there is to know about skipping stones.”

“Great,” I said, “but there are no rocks.”

“Don’t you worry about a thing. I got magical pockets that’ll refill with skipping stones as long as I’m here.” He reached in and pulled out the most perfect stone I’d ever seen. “I came prepared,” he said.

We didn’t talk about feelings or life goals or disappointments. We skipped stones. It was awesome.

Then he was gone, like he’d never been there. He didn’t warn me. We didn’t even hug good-bye.

Still, it happened: I’m the best at skipping stones I’ve ever been. And, in my glove compartment, I keep one perfect stone as a reminder.