(One of the few requests I can actually grant. Thanks to those of you who asked for this story.)
I met Lochlan three weeks after moving to the neighborhood my parents still live in to this day. I was newly eight years old and we had moved around the Maritimes three or four times by then, summering in Shediac and Cape Cod equally, breathing in sand, exhaling salt air. Settling near Halifax because my father worked there and it was close to my grandparents, who lived down along the south shore of Nova Scotia.
(If I didn't spend my early childhood on the beach, I have spent it in the car, or rather standing beside it on the shoulder of every Eastern coastal highway you can name, dry-heaving because I can't sit in the backseat of a car. I still can't, to this day and Gravol is Bridget's very own roofie cocktail.
Out like a light for days.
Is that a tangent? I'm sorry.)
Anyway, the night I met Lochlan was the night he made his best-ever shot on goal (for a thirteen-year-old boy), knocking me down with the practice ball they were using for street hockey. They were playing a quick pick-up game, sons versus fathers in the waning light of a hot July night during the neighborhood block party. The bonfire licked at the sky at the end of the street just off the pavement where the road turned to forest and the path to the ball field began.
Up until I hit the ground I had been on the sort of high only an Elementary-school student jacked up on ice cream and excitement can manage and I never heard him yell a warning, though afterward I am told his thirteen-year-old voice broke spectacularly and he was teased for the rest of the summer, until that other kid showed up for Junior High with high-water pants on and Lochlan was left mercifully alone, having enjoyed a complete deepening of his voice at that point in late puberty that meant he was well and truly ensconced in teenagehood now and had little use for some kid in grade three.
But for reasons that remain a mystery to me, we were instant friends. He picked me up off the pavement and felt my head gingerly and apologized profusely. By then all of the dads were present, and all the other boys too. He told them he would take me to his kitchen to get an ice pack and they could continue the game without him. He put his arm around my shoulders and pointed out his house and we walked slowly in the dark as kids ran by with sparklers (oh, how I wanted one!) and bubbles and frosted cans of rootbeer and Dr. Pepper and hotdogs with grubby, blackened buns and the last dregs of relish from the jar.
Once in his kitchen, Lochlan promptly forgot about the ice, instead telling me I had cool hair. I was sitting on my long hair, perched on the bar stool by the counter. He poured a couple of glasses of cream soda for us and asked me if I had eaten at the barbecue. I had a hamburger, I told him and he nodded. Good.
After a few minutes I asked if we could go back to the party. I was hoping there would be some sparklers left and I had precious minutes remaining in my wild night of summer freedom. I wasn't about to waste those opportunities. Besides. All boys were always nice to me to show Bailey how awesome they were. I was sure he would be no different.
Lochlan nodded and we left, leaving his house unlocked as people did back in 1979 and he walked me back down to the end of the street and the bonfire, where most of the adults and children had gathered to watch the flames and roast marshmallows. He said goodbye and repeated his apology for hitting me with the ball and then he stuck his hands in the front pockets of his jeans and walked away back toward the boys, who were still enjoying their pick-up game even though it was too dark to find their sticks, let alone the nets.
I burned four marshmallows beyond recognition, ate seven raw ones, and then started to become hypnotized by the flames when Lochlan returned and called me away from the log where I had been perched. I went to him and he produced a lighter and a single sparkler, which he lit and handed to me.
Didn't want you to miss anything, he said.
He lit a sparkler for me every night for the remainder of that summer. Every now and then we'll buy a package for no reason at all and light them and the nostalgia hits all at once, just like a hockey ball to the back of one's head. If you aren't careful it will knock you right over.
