Syd and the Good-Times-Happy-Childhood-Jubilee

My cousin, Syd, is an only child and therefore, by default, he was an extremely odd child having spent endless hours in quiet solitude, forced to entertain himself. I, being ridiculously strange myself, having been raised by a father who harbored a very public love for Monty Python movies, (he once printed me copy of the script to Holy Grail with the "Spank the Virgin" scene omitted) immediately recognized a kindred spirit in Syd and resolved to become friends with him. In fourth grade, I knew we were cousins but I didn't know quite how to start a conversation with him. My moment of opportunity finally came when our teacher put us in pairs, desks facing each other, to work on a class project. I drew back my leg and kicked the absolute shit out of him. He looked confused, so I smiled letting him know that my intentions were friendly. He smiled sincerely back at me in understanding and promptly returned the shit-kick. We've been friends ever since.




Me, my brother (Cletus), and Syd

 
 The first time I really remember going to his house for the primary reason of playing with him, I found him in his back yard, nailing the bodies of red-painted Barbie dolls to a tree. His grandmother had found them at a yard sale and decided, for some reason, to bring them home. I was just glad that he had found a use for them. Peas and carrots, y'all.

Our favorite past time was to record "radio shows" with the use of an old beat-up tape recorder. "How Loud Can You Fart" was our game show. And "A Walk in the Forest with Mr. Rodgers" consisted of a friendly male host who ventured into the woods to admire the joys of nature . . . and then horribly maul the gentle forest creatures who reside there. We had invented our own characters, one of whom was named "Crazy Ed," voiced by my brother. Crazy continues to be a point of interest to me only because my 10-year old brother had put so much back-story into the character. He was the mentally feeble (and slightly deranged) cooking show host, who in an "interview" revealed to us the source of his mental instability. He was born when he was six. Looking back, I think we were more creative then than we are now and I would give my good eye to still have a copy of those tapes. Alas, they've been missing for over a decade.

Syd had a pet in the form of a rubber snake, with a grotesquely askew lower jaw, named Frederick. And for a good year (or more) Syd carted that thing around with him everywhere that he went. Oh, the times we had. Frederick couldn't talk. He could only hiss, and only Syd understood him. And when you tried to insist that you could, in fact, understand Frederick, and that Frederick did, in fact, disagree with Syd, Syd would become slightly pissed off. Did I mention that he and I were twelve when all this went down?

We were on the verge of adolescence then. Delightfully strange and innocent, but also straddling the transition between childhood and adolescence. Eventually, the interest in creating radio shows waned and we began listening to Nirvana and Pink Floyd in my grandparents' car whenever they drug us to bluegrass conventions. Discussions became deeper as they turned to matters of life, the enigma and fear of death, and of the crushes that we had developed on each other's friends. Impending teenage angst weighed heavily on us. Somehow, though, we managed to survive it and still remain close friends. I'll be thirty this year and I'm amazed at how similar we still are, and how no matter what goes on in our lives, we can call each other and still manage to morph into those goofy kids that we once were . . . and perhaps always will be.