Theodore Decker: A reminder about our Storytellers Project, and a story on growing up
When you're young nobody your age can die, until someone does.
But I'll come back to that.
Wednesday night, The Dispatch is holding the inaugural event of its Columbus Storytellers Project.
The project is dedicated to the idea that oral storytelling and journalism go hand-in-hand, that within a community lies a collective wisdom that can and should be shared.
This first event will be held at 7 p.m.at the Columbus Athenaeum, 32 N. Fourth St., in Downtown Columbus. Tickets, ranging in price from $8 to $12, can be purchased at StorytellersProject.com/tickets. You can find more details there.
What will the night be like? Think of radio programs like "The Moth Radio Hour" and "Snap Judgment."
Tickets, information: The Columbus Storytellers Project
Five people — Dispatch reporter Holly Zachariah and four folks from outside the paper — will share their personal stories the old-school way, by word-of-mouth. All are focusing on a period of their lives when they experienced growth, but where they take that theme is up to them.
FAQs: Everything you need to know about the Columbus Storytellers Project
In that spirit, I thought I'd share a story of my own, the time when I first discovered that death wasn't reserved for the old.
In high school, I was in the band.
I loved music then and still do, but I hated being in band.
I played the saxophone, if you can call what I did "playing." I sat last chair in the "bad" concert band, and I'm sure the band teachers wouldn't have minded one bit if I slipped out of that chair one day, never to return.
I stayed for one reason, and it wasn't because I feared the discussion I would have to have with my parents should I decide to quit ("We bought you that saxophone, and you're going to use it!")
No, I stayed because my girlfriend at the time was in band.
She loved it, but then, she was musically-inclined. When I first met her, she played the flute but she changed to trombone because the band director needed trombones. He needed someone who could play anything. She could.
A kid named Brad also played trombone.
He and I had something in common. We both liked my girlfriend.
Brad was a year behind us. He and my girlfriend were good friends. I considered him a friend, too. But it became clear that he wanted more than just a friendship with my girlfriend. He had a crush on her.
I just couldn't let that go.
There may be nothing dumber than a jealous teenage boy, and I seethed with petty stupidity. The jealousy got the better of me.
I came to see him no longer as a friend but as a threat. He was nice and funny but also could play his instrument, which made him arguably better suited for my girlfriend than a guy who regularly and cavalierly committed grave crimes against musicality.
You see my dilemma.
Eventually, I did what I still do on occasion. I blew up, in a fiery and melodramatic fashion.
My message, heavily edited: Back. Off.
Brad, being the decent kid that he was, backed off.
That, as I remember it, was toward the end of the school year. We were juniors; he was a sophomore. We went into summer break with me pretending that he didn't exist.
As the saying goes, the dude was dead to me.
And then, in a blink, he was dead.
It happened not long after school let out. Brad died not in a car crash like the one that would kill the little sister of another of my friends a few years later. He died of a congenital heart condition. He had felt tired and lay down on the couch at home. And that was it.
He was 16.
How I found out in the days before cellphones and social media, I don't remember. I'm guessing that my girlfriend — who is now my wife of 25 years — told me about it. I'd ask her to confirm this, but it hurts her to talk about Brad, even now. I long ago learned to respect her wishes on this.
Everyone was stunned, and I was deeply ashamed at the way I'd burned down our friendship in an immature fit of rage. There was no fixing this. It was a cliché. The last time we talked, I screamed.
I am not one to believe in signs, but shortly after Brad died I had a dream, possibly the most vivid I have ever had.
Our high school had an indoor pool, and in the dream I was sitting up on the bleachers watching other kids swim. The room was thick with steam, in a way that it never was in reality. You could barely see, but I heard someone come clanking down the bleachers behind me.
It was Brad. He sat beside me, and we talked. I don't remember anything profound being said, but upon waking it felt like absolution.
I'm well aware that this absolution was a figment of my subconscious mind.
So, over these many years, I've asked for absolution at Chapel Knoll Cemetery in Coopers Plains, New York. I've gone after high school graduation, then college, my marriage to his onetime crush, after one kid and then two. Last summer my son came with me to the cemetery and I told him the story. He is already three years older than Brad was when he died.
Since that summer in 1987 there have been so many other deaths in my life, my parents included.
They are buried at Chapel Knoll too, just a few rows away from Brad. Now my routine is to pay my respects to them, then walk through the rows and spend a few moments with him.
Rarely do I say anything out loud. I look at his smiling face etched into black granite. It's a remarkable likeness, and instructive.
Only the dead stay frozen in time. The lucky, the living, keep on, regrets and all.
tdecker@dispatch.com
@Theodore_Decker
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus Storytellers Project: An invitation to an evening of stories
