What we remember: It's not always right

When I was ten years old my parents moved our family from the city to the suburban countryside. We were part of that post World War 2 exodus from the city that felt that three-quarters of an acre of property was very close to owning a farm or maybe even an estate.
The builder of our house lived on a five-acre parcel of land right across the street from us, and one of his sons was my age, so we became friends. They lived in an old farmhouse, had a large barn, and owned several horses and a pony, something a boy of ten admires. Raised in the city, I was wiry and pale, and my new friend was taller, stronger, and tanned; a set of characteristics a transplanted city kid at that time had to admire.
That area in Bucks County Pennsylvania in the 1950's was a young boys dream, with cornfields for raiding, woods for building forts and camping, and a creek for swimming or searching for minnows and crayfish. Several miles away an old feed mill was still grinding feed using a water wheel powered by crystal clear cold water flowing over a small dam.
No one worried about crime or their kids being in danger. I would leave our house in the morning and sometimes not show up again until the sunset was pretty much finished, having wandered at various times of the day several miles from my home. “What did you do today” was the question I got from my mom, not “where were you.” In many ways it was a different time, but not all.
One day my friend and I were wandering aimlessly down by the mill, walking in the water just in front of the dam and looking for something. I think I was eleven years old at the time.
Two older boys came out of the woods and started first to follow us, then to corner us between the edge of the creek and the steep rocky embankment cut by that creek over many millennia. I remember nothing of their faces or their clothes, nothing about them including the color of their hair, nothing at all but what they said and how big they looked.
They were probably sixteen, maybe older and they had my friend and I trapped.
“Don’t even try to get away,” the one said. “We’ll beat the living shit out of you.”
They both sat down on a rock about ten feet from us, each with a big stick in their hand and the second one sneered at us and said. “You’re going to suck our….” He finished that sentence, but for the sensibility of the reader I will not.
He then stood up, pulled down his zipper and demonstrated the seriousness of his intentions.
I had never been scared in the woods before, but at that moment I will admit to being afraid. I saw my near future as being beaten up by a much larger person followed by being subjected to a humiliation even at my young age I knew I would never forget.
I looked over at my friend to see if he was as scared as I was, and I saw not a single sign of fear on his face. We both said almost simultaneously, “Go to hell,” but my friend took a step towards the two and I took a step back. He looked brave, I felt scared as the two lowered their pants. A few seconds later there was some noise in the woods that diverted their attention, and I said to my friend, “Come on, lets get out of here,” and we both ran across the creek, eventually finding our way out to the highway, and then walked almost silently home. I don’t remember ever talking about the incident. I was embarrassed that he seemed brave and I was scared, and I was sure he did not want to embarrass me further by bringing it up.
Now the point of this story has nothing to do with the attempted act of those two boys. From my point of view it has to do with something far more significant.
I harbored those feelings of not being as brave as I should have been for much of my adolescent and young adult life. Whenever the memory of that time in the woods would surface I just kept wishing I had been braver, wishing I had been willing to fight, wishing I had been like my friend, and angry at myself that I had not.
After high school we drifted apart, different colleges, different careers, and living in different parts of the country. Every few years I would hear something about my friend but not much, and we never got a chance to talk about all the great times we had growing up, or to ever mention this one event.
That was until almost thirty years later at our twentieth high school reunion.
After a lot of fun, and more than a few drinks we were talking by ourselves while our wives were getting acquainted and other friends were catching up. My grade school friend said, “Remember that time you and I were in the woods down by Mill Creek and those two older boys stopped us? I nodded my head, afraid that he was finally going to question me about my actions that day.
“I can’t believe how brave you were,” he said. “I was scared to death and you, well you just told them to go to hell and walked away.”
I’m sure that my face echoed my surprise. “ What the hell are you talking about,” I said. You were the one that stood up to them.” We countered each other for a few minutes with a bunch of, “You were, no you were’s”, before we stopped.
For almost thirty years each of us thought that we were the frightened one and that the other was brave. Thirty years of wishing we had been different, wishing that we had been just like the other person had seen us to be.
I may not be able to describe the lesson learned eloquently, but I did learn the lesson, and part of it is that we should not be so hard on ourselves. Sometimes our actions are far better than we think they are.