The Songs Remain: An Ode to Anthony

I’m so alone, feel just like somebody else

Man, I ain’t changed, but I know I ain’t the same

Anthony and I go back a ways.

One of my earliest memories of him is from fourth grade. I had started an exclusive club consisting of myself and my three closest friends: The Thunderbirds. I created a cipher to write in code, and messages were passed back and forth (though Ms. Thomas discreetly informed me the miniature mailbox I mounted on my desk for the purpose was not going to fly).

The name and premise presumably made sense to our nine year old selves.

Not to be outdone, Anthony started a rival club, the name of which is lost to antiquity. In a master stroke, I concocted an espionage scheme wherein I would defect to his club, sit in on their meetings, and steal all their secrets. Despite the strained logic, the plan worked! Unfortunately, the first meeting revealed there were no secrets to steal. Combined with our collective fatigue of writing in code, this revelation sent The Thunderbirds into hiatus, where it remains at present.

Maybe someday.

One thing I did discover was that Anthony enjoyed music. It was more than a passing interest, and by junior high he had much more exposure than anyone in our hayseed farming community could have been expected to in the mid 90s. My father had six presets on his car radio, and every one of them was a country station. While I sat through endless hours of country in the car and gospel at church, though, Anthony was by some unknown mechanism somehow learning what ska music was – among many other things.

And so it came to pass that a random conversation in the eighth grade during music class produced a proffered CD to borrow: Take Me to Your Leader by Newsboys. I could probably take you back to the floor tile I was standing on at the time if it still existed (our entire school burned to the ground later that school year, a tale for another day).

It was a seminal moment for me.

Hard rock it was not – that would come later. But it was twangless and devoid of steel guitar, and I nom nom nommed it up. After that was The Wallflowers, and if I had any artistic ability I could paint a picture of the stretch of country road the school bus was on when I first heard One Headlight, with Anthony manning the boombox in the back. He and I didn’t completely see eye to eye sonically – I had little time for his Mighty Mighty Bosstones habit, among other things – but he gave me a wonderful toehold in a cool new place.

Anthony sometimes found it hard to carve a place out for himself in our hometown. He’d have had community at a skate park in another place, but it was nearly an hour’s drive to the nearest one as it was. Our high school’s parking lot wasn’t even paved until well after we graduated, and trying to ride what few skatable linear feet there were around the school would have gotten you promptly pelted with chalkboard erasers from a blue haired old timer teacher.

And so he found himself oft-maligned. But he was kind, and protective.

In the midst of the songs of our eighth grade year, we lost a classmate, Daniel, to a firearm accident. We shellshocked thirteen- and fourteen-year olds donned obviously little-used formalwear and huddled together in a pastel pink funeral parlor to say goodbye. We boys tried to stay strong, but we were outmatched by a girl – Daniel’s sister Liz, who somehow kept her voice through a devastating song.

Elizabeth, I don’t know where life has taken you, but looking back as an adult I have no idea how you managed to do that. I grieve for you afresh every time I think about it.

Afterward, Anthony seemed upset. Half angry. He finally said after prompting he didn’t think they’d done Daniel justice in how he looked at the funeral. There was plenty of huffing and eye-rolling out of his earshot of people assuming he was trying to make everything about him. I didn’t see it that way, though.

I saw a brother sticking up for a brother, one last time.

High school came and went, as it does, and Anthony and I charted out our lives’ courses, as young men do. He became a father to four kids while I wound along my own path. And then, suddenly, his ended: A mutual friend messaged to say he’d been killed in a car accident. He was 31.

We were 31.

I could probably take you back to the parking space I was sitting in when I got the news. I let out an exhale, and a gauzy, tangerine-tinted memory wafted into view.

The two of us were eleven, hanging out on a summer day in the fields around his home down a back road. I wasn’t his ideal guest. He tried to teach me skateboarding on his porch; to give you an idea of how well I took to it, I didn’t get back on one for ten years.

Then he wanted to go plink cans with his .22 rifle, but my father had somewhat presciently specifically forbidden me from so much as looking at a gun over at his place. The way he had said it made me think the punishment probably would have been being sent to my room, only directly through the drywall (not really, but you get my point).

Being a cool eleven year old boy, though, I couldn’t bring myself to utter the phrase “my dad won’t let me,” so I felt compelled to go into some long-winded explanation about why I, independently, didn’t actually want to shoot tin cans off a fence rail when I desperately did. To Anthony’s credit, he didn’t belabor his incredulity, and we wound up exploring the fields and brooks with a leisure I’m doubtful exists in abundance on this continent anymore.

We’d have told you then that life was hard. But we didn’t have a care in the world. We were one, two boys by the river, down by the water, blissfully disconnected from our world in a way my children may never understand.

My friend Anthony lies in a field of stone beneath a marker bearing testament to his loves: The names of his four children, and a guitar, embossed in bronze. I look at it with a measure of remorse. I should have told him all of this. Should have told him my children will enjoy the fruits of his influence, that I still carry him with me in a way that is disproportionate to how much we interacted as adults.

He was just always going to be around for me to do that, you see.

If you have a parallel in your life – someone who gave you something of value once, which you’ve taken with you upon your path – don’t make my same mistake. Tell them now. They, too, deserve to know.

I look at Anthony’s obituary picture and still see that fourteen year old boy. See the kid trying unsuccessfully to start a fashion trend of only buttoning the top button of your shirt, and – more helpfully – quietly admonishing me to never speak to another soul of my musing about whether I should buy the new CD from this popular new Spice Girls group.

His face is chiseled by time and circumstance. But he’s in there.

So am I. And so are you. Don’t lose touch with that boy, no matter how manly you think you’ve gotten.

I’ll see you down the road, Anthony. I imagine we’ll each have new songs to share when next we see one another.

They say that children now

They come in all ages

And maybe sometimes old men die

With little boy faces

—

This post was previously published on The Unbothered Father.

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