With all that we’ve had going on lately the blog has suffered. This is not good. The blog is a very important component of ‘what we hope to accomplish’. So, I’ll take this opportunity to introduce you all to a very good friend of mine that I came to know well through out the course of my life.
Ignatius Quay Endicott and I have maintained a pen pal relationship since third grade. Everyone who knows him calls him simply ‘I.Q.’, which makes for difficult punctuation at the end of sentences. His family, much to I.Q.’s displeasure, calls him Iggy. Several of the women in his life have used this moniker when addressing my friend as well, but if anyone else calls him that, they better be ready to fight.
Over the years, we’ve shared a lot to each other. I’ve kept most of his letters, and after years of appeals, the man gave consent to reveal the world through I.Q. Endicott’s rare sense of observation.
Feathermaye assures me that she can set up a new section here on ‘as told by’ for them. So, without further warning, here is the first post for “I.Q.’s Letters”. These will come in random and haphazard order, much like life.
Dear S,
I drove by a baseball field yesterday and it reminded me of when we were kids. Couldn’t help it, man, it just came rushing out at me like something I had left behind and forgotten, but never really meant to forget, you know what I mean?
I know that we played a lot of baseball for Benny and good ole Groves, but I remember the football with even more fondness. I guess that’s just me, you know? Who knew then that the game would not remain reachable for normal-sized people? I just remember that day when your mom let us out on the curb in front of the gym…
We were scared, weren’t we? When we got out of the wagon and your mom pulled away, it left the two of us out there with all those guys. Mean looking, a lot of them were. That’s where we first heard about Ranlo feet: so many of the boys out there didn’t even have shoes on. We hadn’t been exposed to the Mill Hill, so we had no idea what life was like for these guys.
They kept looking at us too, especially at you, S. We must have been the only kids with fresh haircuts seen in those parts for a while. Until Coach Bennie came out, and he made me and you look like members of the Beatles by comparison; his flattop buzz was skintight when only a real square would wear it like that. I’d like to hear you talk about that in one of your stories, or blogs or whatever it is you do.
Like how they herded us all inside. The gym seats were pulled out on one side, older kids were telling everyone that still had on shoes to take them off before going on Coach’s shiny waxed hardwood. We were still in our socks, sucking on our mouthpieces with the connecting loop bobbing out in front of our noses. Coach came out and gave us the once over, pointing the two of us into a smaller group on the other side of the floor. A steel door on the wall behind us read: Locker Room. I figured then that we were past the first hurdle. You still looked nervous. You were right, there were much more to come.
Remember those helmets they had us in back then? It makes me wonder if we may have developed brain issues from all the bad wacks we took with those things on. “Frankenstein” helmets, we called them, remember? Because they made your head look all boxy and oafish. Those little white plastic facemasks they gave us back then sucked out loud too! How many kids did we see with cut faces after one of those crappy things failed?
I'd like a good story about running down through those damn woods they made us use to get to the practice field, you know? Spooky, root-twisted paths, up and down, poison Ivy and all that. Old man Dewey's sour apple tree, where he'd shoot at you with rock salt if he caught one of us up there stuffing their helmet with his apples.
You could tell about playing games up in those crazy little towns like Stanley where they had fire hoses laid down and spiked permanently to line off the field. We were always tripping over those damn hoses, but we knocked the snot out of those guys anyhow.
I know you said you don’t like to tell football stories; you say they’ve all been told and that when you finally did one you would have to take a whole new approach into it. Remember, you told me that not long after we saw ‘The Last Boy Scout’. You said: ‘There isn’t any good football material anymore, nothing new anyhow…’ I never quite understood what you meant there, except that, well, so many guys played ball growing up. We all met up with the end of football, for us anyhow. We’re all out there wishing we still could play. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, am I?
C’mon, S…This is your old pal Ignatius Quay Endicott telling you that it is okay with me for you to start telling those old stories.
We’re waiting…
Sincerely,
I.Q.
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