Last Saturday, I took a buddy of 38 years(!) to Busch Stadium for his first visit to the nest of the St. Louis Cardinals. Had the opportunity to introduce a long-distance traveler to several former Memphis Redbirds, in my happy place. Audie Artero didn’t grow up a Cardinals fan as I did (third generation), but he grew up a teammate of mine (basketball and soccer, in addition to baseball). We were small-town partners, and not just in the outfield for Northfield (VT) High School. We tended to travel as a tandem, at least when not on a date or scouting foreign turf (perhaps a party “way up” in Montpelier).
Ours is a cosmic friendship, of a sort, as the odds of the two of us ever crossing paths were astronomical. I was born in Tennessee and found my way to a small hamlet in central Vermont via California (among other family stops). Audie was born in North Carolina and found his way to Northfield via Texas (among other family stops). Our connective thread: Our fathers were hired, a year apart, by Norwich University.
Audie is now a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and has called Guam home for more than two decades. This makes the days we actually share a room — or baseball stadium — a little more significant than visits across a time zone or two. We tend to make the most of them, and we’ve managed to get together the old-fashioned way every odd year since 2009. (I trail Audie by a few ocean-widths of air travel.)
Qualities in a friend you keep on the other side of the globe? It starts, of course, with our high school experience. We “shared our morning days,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it. But I’ll note a couple of Audie’s shining traits. I’ve never witnessed him act cruel, in the slightest, to another person. (Except on a basketball court. He introduced himself in a pickup game and swatted my first shot with malice beyond the reach of most 14-year-olds.) This is a guy who excuses himself when someone takes his place in line. And Audie has virtually no ego, despite an abundance of smarts and talent. (There was no Mutombo finger-wag after that block. He took possession of the ball, and scored.)
Senior year in high school, I entered an essay contest in which we were tasked with writing about three people we admired, past or present. I wrote about Thomas Jefferson, Mohandas Gandhi, and Audie Artero. Took second place. Good friends, it turns out, make for inspired writing and good reading.
Audie and I have each been blessed with happy marriages for more than a quarter century. We’ve each raised a pair of daughters. (Like mine, Audie’s got his mother’s good looks.) Our friendship would make a decent Hallmark movie were it not for a few minor laws broken along the way. (In a small town, you can often answer the blue lights with a sincere apology.) The long distance component — Memphis is 7,500 miles from Guam — would be the tear-jerker, but our story has been packed with so much laughter, audiences would be too exhausted from the happy to waste any energy on the sad.
We followed our night at the ballpark with a Sunday tour of Anheuser-Busch. Audie and I have contributed to the company’s profit margin over the years, so a view of the Budweiser barrels, you might say, was overdue. It was one of those experiences, we often agreed, we’d enjoy someday. No need to write such plans down, or create a list, not even with 7,500 miles part of the equation. It’s funny. When “someday” arrives with a special friend, no matter how long it takes, it feels right on time.
