Class Story 124 Best Friend Dies

·       (v) Class Story 124 My Best Friend Dies 1949

By the time I got deeply into the fifth grade, I was good friends with two fellows, Skip Smith, on the right in the picture (bottom left of this page), and Tremaine Adrian.  One of our common interests was mathematics.  However, the most important one was our youthful and beautiful mathematics teacher, Mrs. Pat Bergna.  We all three were madly in love with her.  She had announced her engagement to be married before classes ended that year, 1949.  I don't remember her maiden name.

Undaunted, we volunteered to mow her lawn all summer in exchange for math lessons.  I'm sure she realized that we all had this crush on her.  We dutifully arrived at her little house every Saturday morning on our bicycles and spent a few hours trimming the yard so that it looked like it had been to the barbershop.  She kept her part of the bargain and when we were done, she would serve us lunch and give us an algebra lesson.  Life moved on in the sixth grade and we did Boy Scouts rather than Mrs. Bergna that year. 

That was the year when, first time in my life, I thought about myself as a unique individual who would live and die.  I had these thoughts while walking home from an evening Boy Scout Troop meeting at the school.  These days you wouldn't let an eleven-year-old kid walk the streets in the dark.  In my English class, for a book review, I choose "Of Time and the River" by Thomas Wolfe.  Not the current T. Wolfe author.  The one who wrote my book died in 1938.  My teacher was astounded and unbelieving, since it was almost 900 pages and weighty writing like Faulkner's stories about the South.  But I was able to answer all the teacher’s questions, so I got credit.

In the summer, between sixth and seventh grades, the word came to my mother, who was a good friend of Tremaine's mother that he had been diagnosed with Polio and was in an Iron Lung.  I was kept away from all that early trauma.  The mothers must have shared their agony.  I know my mother feared that we might get Polio, stemming back to our early days in Detroit.  I started to visit Tremaine once a week after school.  I was not forced, nor even encouraged to do this.  I had to take a bus over to what is now the Valley Medical Center on Bascom and Moorpark and back again.  It took a whole afternoon.  I didn't know, or comprehend, at the time what the prognosis was. 

My visits dwindled to once every two weeks during the eighth grade and once a month during the ninth grade, by then I'd figured out that there was no hope and it would be over soon.  Each year I would twist the arms of various singing groups at Christmas time to come with me to the hospital.  I love to sing Christmas Carols, although I have no real voice for it.  But that was something I could do and it elated everybody for a while.  It's strange how some of these sorts of things stick with us.  I still join in with Christmas groups that will have me, shouting out, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen."  A favorite time of life was when my good friend Donna Roberts used to have annual Christmas parties in Bernal Heights.  She would hire a piano player and drag out the sheet music for all to join in and sing carols.  I joined a hospital choir group when I returned to Tucson for graduate studies.

Tremaine died during the spring term of the ninth grade.  We had slowly lost an oral connection for speaking about current events.  This was understandable with all that goes on in a young life between twelve and fifteen.  We still talked about feelings and wishes.  His wish was to get out of that lung.  We spoke of what we wished for the future, for me it was cars, for him, girls.  I know that at the end, he understood that he wasn't going to live much longer, but into what context can a 15-year-old boy put thoughts of his own demise?  I'm sure there were other deaths around me during the preceding 15 years, but this was the first that affected me so personally.  I still think of him every Christmas.