By: Bob Clancy
One of my childhood friends lived around the corner. Dennis is a year, older but we were interested in the same things. Biking, skating and stick ball were at the top of the list. We attended the same school until I moved across the street and had to change schools. A ride on my grandfather’s truck was always special for us. We always had time for events, like the march to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn. Our teenage years (see Photo) brought dancing, dating, and going to the city to hear jazz at the Metropole. Although we went to different high schools, we always had time for each other. He went away to college; I went to work and College at night. He went to Grad school, and I went into the Army National Guard.
Teaching was his profession while I stayed in the corporate world in New York and Connecticut. I was in his wedding party, and he was in mine, only four months apart. Dennis still married to his best girl with great legs. Meanwhile, my wife met someone else. My second wife never met him she because passed. After several years of sending holiday cards, we finally got together in our old Brooklyn neighborhood.
While we were walking, on the Boardwalk at Coney Island, with a Nathan hotdog in my hand, he asked me if I was dating? I was open for suggestions, and he offered one. I took his advice and went on a ferry ride across the Long Island Sound to meet an Irish lass. As it turned out, she was his wife’s college roommate and high school friend. Better yet, she was a bridesmaid in their wedding party 39 years earlier so we may have walked the down same aisle together. Six years later we got married Dennis was my best man. Eileen and I will be celebrating our 9th anniversary this year with our extended family of five children and 10 grandchildren. Oh, Dennis and I have been friends for over 70 years. This past September my wife and I moved into his town, so we are now, as luck would have it, once again Dennis is living just “around the corner.”
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