My First Best Friend

A photo from my birthday party in elementary school. Dave is on the left; I'm in the middle. Notice the matching white muscle shirts!

A few weeks ago I learned that my childhood friend, David, died on January 9, 2020, after a long battle with multiple myeloma. He was a man of many talents and was an accomplished attorney and mover and shaker in Washington, D.C. (see video, below). But to me he will always be my first best friend.

Anne Lamott says that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write about for the rest of their lives. I suggest a key criterion for surviving childhood is having a best friend. It would be impossible to overstate the importance. That first connection outside our immediate family with someone who gets us, someone who shares our interests, someone who makes us laugh, someone we can talk with about anything, share secrets with, and ask the questions we are too embarrassed to ask our parents  likely goes a long way toward establishing our healthy self image and giving us a model and comparison for all of the friends we will make in the future.

For C. S. Lewis, it was Arthur Greeves, a boy of the same age in his Belfast neighborhood, who invited teenage Jack over for a visit on one of his holidays from boarding school. On that first meeting the two discovered their mutual love of reading—especially stories about Norse mythology—and music, and they would maintain a lifelong correspondence and friendship in spite of their differences (e.g., Arthur was gay; Lewis was not).

Clive Staples Lewis had an unusual first and middle name, which is likely why he declared at the age of 3 that he wanted to be called Jacksie (later shortened to Jack). My first best friend also had an unusual name, but it was his last name, Tittsworth, that would lead to endless teasing by his classmates in elementary and junior high school and would cause him as a college student to consider legally changing his name. (Reportedly, when he approached his dad with the idea, George Tittsworth asked, what’s wrong with the name David?)

Dave and I met as members of the 4^th grade class at Black Elementary in Wichita, Kansas. We had been selected for the class as part of an initiative to provide a unique learning environment for “gifted” students. The class size was small, and the instruction was designed to interest students who, based on their test scores, were, presumably, ready for a greater academic challenge than was offered in their regular elementary school classes.

Of course, I wasn’t seeking, at the age of 10, greater academic challenges. All I really cared about was whether the teachers were nice and what the other kids in the class were like. The main change I noticed initially was that my mom had to drive me to school and pick me up each day. Before that, I had gone to my neighborhood school and I walked to and from school.

I liked the other students in my new school though I only remember a few of them today. I remember Eugene Gilden, an extremely outgoing fellow, who greeted me on the first day of class with a hearty “Hi, I’m Eugene. Welcome to Black Elementary!” I remember Brian Slabosky, who had a sizeable gap between his two front teeth that allowed him to perform impressive tricks at the water fountain, much to our amusement. And I remember David Tittsworth. He and I hit it off immediately and were soon spending afternoons after school at each other’s houses.

Dave lived in the Riverside neighborhood, about three miles from my house in the Indian Hills neighborhood of Wichita. Dave’s mom would have passed our house when driving her son to and from school at Black Elementary. Our moms had the thankless task of chauffeuring us back and forth between each other’s houses.

C. S. Lewis suggests that friendship has to be about something—some common interest that causes two acquaintances to become friends. What did Dave and I have in common—besides being two boys in the same small elementary school class? First, sports. I had fallen in love with basketball early. I don’t know if Dave had before we met, but I remember we spent lots of hours refining our jump shots on the hoop that my dad had installed at the edge of our garage roof at the 13^th street house. The long driveway provided ample room for us to practice, not only layups and mid-range shots, but what would have been three pointers, had the three-point shot actually existed in those days. When the Kansas winter set in, we moved to the basement of our house where we could play ping pong or pool. We spent most of our time at the pool table. My Uncle Jim had managed to find a couple of sturdy, slate pool tables in a bar/pool hall that was closing down in a rural Kansas town and had purchased one for himself and one for my dad. Moving the heavy slate and solid wood table down the long, narrow steps to our basement was a complicated operation, but, once accomplished, I thought I was the luckiest boy on earth to have a such an entertainment oasis at my disposal.

I loved playing pool with my dad, but he was a busy man. Five days a week he was a junior high English teacher; on weekends he was the preacher for the Northside Church of Christ. So Dave became my consistent pool playing partner.

Two boys with lively imaginations, however, can only play so many games of 8 Ball before boredom sets in. So Dave and I would invent new games—games that used the equipment of the table but were unrecognizable to any player of traditional pool or billiards. The game I remember most we called “Lag.” It worked like this: The pool balls were divided equally between the two of us, and we would engage in a series of lag challenges. A lag in pool is when the player strikes the ball from one end of the table to the opposite end. The ball strikes the bumper and returns the length of the table. The goal is have the ball come to rest as close as possible to the bumper nearest where the player struck the ball originally. Some players use the lag contest at the beginning of a game to determine who shoots first.

The wrinkle in our invented game was that lagging became the game itself. Now that probably sounds like a boring game, but there’s more. Dave and I had created names for each of our pool balls. Over time, each ball became a team member—a character with a name, a nationality, a back story—all of which would be narrated with great detail and seriousness before and during each lag contest. We even created a poster with a color-coded key showing each team member and including some significant stats about them. While I can’t remember the specific stories we narrated about our team members, I do know the game provided us with hours of fun and laughter.

As I write about the Lag game my friend and I invented, I’m struck by its nerdiness. It also indicates the relative affluence and privilege we both held as members of the white middle class. We obviously had a lot of free time on our hands. Our parents were not asking us to do chores after school, for example. However, another game Dave and I invented to pass the time is embarrassing to remember. It was a game we only played once, but because it was connected to a historically significant event, it’s one neither Dave nor I could ever forget. I can even attach a date to this game: November 22, 1963, the date President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As I recall, our teacher had announced to our class that the President had been shot and that we would have an early release from school as a result. David came to my house, and we were in the basement when one of us came up with idea for a new game called “Shoot the President.” I know, it’s horrible, but, in our defense, we were 10 years old and did not grasp the seriousness of the moment.

I recently recalled this event when reading Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street with my freshman class. Cisneros tells the story of a sickly aunt who was confined to her bed and who she and her siblings and friends would sometimes visit and help. Cisneros relates how when she and her friends would play pretend, she would imitate her aunt’s awkward movements. The other children would laugh, and Cisneros confesses to enjoying their laughter. She also confesses how bad she felt when she gained enough maturity to recognize how cruel and insensitive their pretend games were. In one of our last email exchanges before my friend’s death, we recalled our twisted game from childhood. Ironically, Dave went on to have a distinguished career in government and politics in Washington, D. C., so he told me there were few people with whom he could share the story. Probably better that it remained our secret—at least until now.

Besides our love for playing and watching sports, another common bond that Dave and I shared was that we came from families where church was central to our home life. Dave and his family were members of the Methodist Church, and his father, as I recall, was the music minister and choir director. Like my dad, Dave's father worked two jobs: in addition to his church work, he was a State Farm insurance agent. My family were members of the Northside Church of Christ where my dad was the preaching minister. As mentioned above, my dad’s other job was as a junior high English teacher.

I think this similarity between our family priorities was significant for our relationship. In our younger years as friends, it provided some shared boundaries of behavior that no doubt made our parents feel good about the two of us spending time together. As we moved into our teenage years, we shared the experiences of testing some of those boundaries as we experimented with smoking and drinking—practices that would have been prohibited in each of our households. Finally, I’m sure both of us felt the added burden of being sons of church leaders. In those days it was not uncommon for church leader parents to put added pressure on their children to be “extra good” so as to be role models for the other kids at church. Of course, that same pressure often backfired with certain kids—thus, the experimentation mentioned above!

Though Dave and I attended different churches, one event from our high school years stands out. It was one of the only times we participated in a Christian gathering together. Dave’s Methodist church hosted an evening Young Life event where teens from many different churches (or no church) would gather to eat pizza, sing, and hear a speaker. Dave was asked to lead the singing part of the gathering, and at some point he invited me to join him in that. We would play our guitars and lead the group in singing Christian songs—not hymns, but more folky singalong, camp type songs. Dave was an accomplished musician but more on the piano than the guitar. He had only recently taken up the guitar. I had been playing guitar since fourth grade, but I was pretty introverted and shy in those days, so it was a big step for me to be on stage in front of a hundred or so peers. I’m sure I would not have been able to do it without my friend to encourage me.

There was another way in which these events called me to step outside my comfort zone. My church sang only a cappella in its worship services. No musical instruments were allowed in the sanctuary in the tradition I grew up in. So I’m sure at the time it was something of a shock to my parents that I was singing Christian songs in a church to guitar accompaniment. To their credit, they did not forbid it—and even came to one of the events at my invitation and, as I recall, never said anything critical or negative about it. It was lots of fun. Dave was a ham, who always loved to be in front of an audience while I was a wannabe ham. I was scared to death the entire time but still enjoyed the experience. The only song I remember from those singalongs was one Dave and I invented called the “Romp-Stomp Medley.” We strung several bouncy Christian songs together (one, I think, was “This World is Not My Home/I’m just a passin’ through”) and that was our big finale.

Music would continue to be a shared interest that drew us together. We listened to albums together and would often try to work out our favorite songs on our guitars. In the summer before our senior year of high school, Dave began hanging out with a kid named Matt Mitchell. Matt was funny, quirky, and highly intelligent. Initially, the friendship was primarily between Dave and Matt but eventually Dave invited me and we became a threesome. We spent many evenings at Matt’s house, where I was amazed to find that Matt was allowed to smoke in his room, his parents obviously being much more open-minded than Dave’s and mine. Matt introduced me to lots of great music, and he also introduced me to Lark cigarettes, which I began to smoke occasionally and furtively during my last year of high school Many evenings of my senior year were spent in Matt’s room, listening to music, playing music, and singing. Matt was super creative, as was Dave, and the two of them composed their own graduation song (“Oh, we hate, hate, hate to graduate/When we leave, we’ll feel bereaved” etc.).  I would go on to have some great musical experiences and meet other good friends, but for sheer fun and camaraderie, I don’t think anything eclipsed those evenings of music with Dave and Matt.

Today as I look back some fifty years, it’s difficult to pinpoint the times when Dave and I would both have said we were best friends. Our closeness tended to wax and wane. For sure, during the period of time when we were in 4th through the 6th grades, I think we both would have used the best friends label. When we moved on to the more expansive junior high population at John Marshall Junior High, things changed. While Dave and I continued to hang out and still visited each other’s houses, we both met new friends at our new school. Dave was more outgoing than I and made friends more easily. I tended to be shy and quiet and was probably much less widely known at the school. We both made the 8^th grade basketball team, but Dave also made the 7^th and 9^th grade teams. Dave, with his musical talents, participated in music and theatre, which I did not, so I’m sure he met a whole new set of friends there. I would say in Junior High we probably moved from best friends to good friends status. In high school, we maintained our friendship and still were often together outside of school, but we were not together constantly as we had been in elementary school. In our senior year, however, because of our friendship with Matt, I probably spent more time outside of school with Dave than I had at any time since elementary school.

Dave and I also played on the tennis team together. North High was a large public school, at the top of the sports classification system in Wichita, and while basketball remained our favorite sport, Dave and I both found the competition for spots on the basketball team too fierce. So we opted for tennis. North High had a terrible tennis team, led by the Driver’s Education instructor, who knew absolutely nothing about coaching tennis. However, for me it was the easiest path to achieving a letter in sports and obtaining the coveted red leather letter jacket that helped one achieve a certain status among one’s high school peers. Tennis, however, was still a good experience. Though our team was terrible and lost most of our matches, we had fun at practice and enjoyed making fun of our coach behind his back. I was the sixth man on the six-man squad. I can’t remember where Dave fell, but I know he was ahead of me.

Both tennis and basketball illustrated a dynamic in our friendship. Dave’s family did not place much emphasis on sports while mine did. My dad had introduced me early on to several sports, including basketball, golf, and tennis. If I remember correctly, Dave had not played any of these sports much until he met me. So I think of myself as introducing him to basketball and tennis. The other reality was that Dave was a more gifted athlete than me, so in both cases, after being introduced to the sport, he would quickly excel me in that sport. This was a reality I had to learn to accept because no matter how much I practiced, I was never able to match my friend in these sports.

When it came time to move on to college, Dave chose Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, while I chose Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City. One of my strongest memories of my early years in college was how much I missed my high school friends, Dave and Matt. I remember writing a poem in my sophomore year where I compared my friends to trees and bewailed the fact that they were growing without me. Dave and I did stay in touch during our freshman years, and we even visited each other once or twice at college. After my freshman year, I returned to Wichita, worked a summer job, and resumed hanging out with Dave and Matt. Dave only completed one year at ORU before returning to Wichita and enrolling in Wichita State University. Dave and I were both English majors. I stayed all four years at Oklahoma Christian. Throughout the college years, our interactions were less frequent, but we always stayed in touch and every time I visited Wichita one of my first priorities was to see him. However, since after my freshman year, I never lived in Wichita again, opportunities to hang out were less frequent. I did attend Dave's wedding and played a Bob Dylan song at it. David went on to the University of Kansas Law School. I married Janet and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, to begin graduate school in English, and at that point we began to lose touch.

And so from the time we were around 22 years old until our late fifties, Dave and I had very little contact. I would hear bits and pieces about his life in Washington, D. C., as an attorney who was becoming influential in politics and government but these snippets often came from his mom running into my mom at the grocery store or the mall and sharing stories about their kids. I continued to cherish memories of my best friend, but we had each moved on to very different lives in very different parts of the country.

Then about seven years ago, Dave and I reconnected—first on Facebook and then through a series of email exchanges where I learned about his diagnosis of multiple myeloma. Interestingly enough while we talked about his health challenges and what our lives were like currently, we talked mostly about the old days and how much we loved growing up as friends in Wichita. We recounted our favorite memories and laughed about them. At times we would remind each other of events the other had forgotten, thus having the pleasure of re-remembering and reliving those days. I will cherish those communications forever because there’s nothing like a best friend.

Here’s something strange: a couple of days before getting news of David’s death, I had mentioned to Janet that I had been thinking about him a lot lately. Over the Christmas break, I had gone back to rescue some old emails from my inbox, which is when I discovered a long email string between Dave and me when we reconnected after I learned of his health problems.

I had been mulling over the possibility of doing a road trip to visit some of my friends from the past, including Dave. Janet said I must have sensed something about his condition since he was so much on my mind. And this is true. Though I had thought about other old friends—like Roger and Richard—it was Dave that was on my mind most. They say parents often sense when their children are in trouble or hurting, so maybe the same thing happens with old best friends.

About two years ago I learned of the death of Matt Mitchell, the third part of the trio of friends from my high school years. It’s weird to think that those friends I spent so much time with no longer walk the earth. I’m now experiencing that sense of loss again that I felt when I left my friends to go off to college, yet in a more ultimate manner. In another, deeper sense, I know that Dave and Matt are always with me because I have those memories, and I know that part of who I am today is a result of those early friendships.

I miss you.

May you rest in peace.

Your friend,

Gary