The summer someone my age finally moved in

When my family moved to our neighborhood, there was nobody my age. There were a couple of older boys, but they got sort of unofficially assigned to my brother. There was one kid about three years younger who I wasn’t sure I wanted to be friends with and then became friends with anyway. And the whole time, quietly, I kept hoping that would change.

So I remember this part pretty vividly. One day I was riding my bike around our street, which looped in a big circle, and I saw a boy who looked about my age. I had to do a double take. Who is that? What is he doing at that house? Had someone moved in there? I came back around the loop and he was gone, and I half-talked myself out of having seen him at all. For a few days I just casually rode the circle, telling myself I wasn’t looking for anyone. Then one afternoon I went the other way around, and there he was again.

I rode over and said hello. His name was Tyler. He was from Michigan. His dad had just started at the GM plant in Wentzville, the same plant a lot of the dads around us worked at, and he’d just moved down with his older sister and their mom. That was it. The exact thing I had been hoping for, standing in a driveway introducing himself.

Fast friends

We became friends almost immediately. Tyler was the outdoor, physical one. Over the years that turned into skateboarding and mountain biking and basically any sport you put in front of him. I liked some of that too. I played soccer, I was always running, I was always on my bike. But he was built for it in a way I wasn’t. What really sealed it was timing: we were the same age, we were about to start middle school together, and we were both carrying the same mix of excitement and quiet dread about it. That bonds you fast.

Then I found out his family had a computer, and that Tyler was up for doing computer stuff with me as much as outdoor stuff. That was the jackpot.

Skits, cheat codes, and two terrible websites

A lot of our friendship got built in front of a screen. We messed around endlessly with the Windows sound recorder, taping little sound effects and skits and bits, then playing them back for each other and passing them around online. Most of it was inside jokes that would mean nothing to anyone else, which is sort of the whole point of being eleven with a good friend.

We both had Game Boys with Pokémon, so we played and traded constantly, and then we did the natural next thing and made a Pokémon website. It was called TNT Pokémon, which stood for Todd ‘n’ Tyler. We would go dig up cheat codes on the bigger Pokémon sites and repost them on ours, like a tiny pair of pirates. It was a Max Pages site, the same humble corner of the early web where Todd55h itself got its start. Tyler eventually spun up his own site too, called Trolley Ride.

I want to be honest about the quality here. These were not good websites. The site you’re reading now is organized, the code is clean, everything is more or less where it should be. Our sites at eleven looked exactly like our bedrooms at eleven: junk everywhere, no system, gloriously ours.

How Tyler taught me to eat fries

This one is silly and obscure, but it has stuck with me for more than twenty years, so it has earned a spot. In sixth grade we ended up with the same lunch period, which meant we got to sit together. It was also the year of the great à la carte lunch, which we were sure was the most sophisticated thing that had ever happened to us, so most days we’d just get a pile of fries and some ketchup or ranch.

I was a one-fry kid. Dip a fry, eat the fry. Dip a fry, eat the fry. Methodical, a little prim about it. Then I watched Tyler grab a whole handful, mash them together, dip the entire bundle at once, and eat four or five fries in a single bite, mid-sentence, probably while we were arguing about Pokémon. It had honestly never occurred to me that this was allowed.

I know how small this is. But it was one of the first times it really clicked that there’s more than one way to do almost anything, and that the way I’d always done it wasn’t a rule, just a habit I’d never questioned. To this day I eat fries two or three at a time. Tyler’s way. And I think of him every single time, which he would probably find ridiculous.

Moving, but not really

Tyler moved from one part of town to another at some point, but it barely dented things. We still saw each other at school, still hung out sometimes, and we talked constantly on AOL Instant Messenger. We reconnected even more in high school. I remember messaging him one day to admit I didn’t really have anyone to sit with at lunch, and asking if I could sit with him and his friends. He said yes without making it weird, and that turned into a genuinely good year of having guys to sit with and talk to.

That was ninth grade, and it turned out to be the only year we ever spent at the same high school. The next move was the big one. The summer after freshman year, Tyler’s family moved back to Michigan. I never asked him much about why. I figured it was a family decision, the same kind of thing that had brought them to Missouri in the first place.

Eric H.

Around then there was a friend named Eric H. He’d been around since about sixth grade, and he and I ran at the same speed, both with schoolwork and with our sense of humor. My best friend growing up was Mike, who was the valedictorian and lived in the advanced classes, so as much as I always hoped Mike and I would land in the same room, we usually didn’t. Eric was the one who actually was in my classes. Every time a teacher announced a group project and the rest of the room started nervously scanning for a partner, Eric and I just looked at each other. That kind of reliable is worth a lot at that age. Outside of school he was more Tyler’s friend, the two of them skateboarding and hanging out. In school he was more mine. Both of those friendships were real.

Near the end of high school, Eric got sick. It came on fast, and an illness none of us saw coming took him, and it knocked the wind out of our whole graduating class. We were kids who hadn’t really lost anyone yet. I don’t think we’d ever stopped to be grateful for each other, or for the plain fact of being alive, because at that age you assume everyone just keeps going forever. Losing Eric was the first time a lot of us learned that wasn’t true. It hit me hard, and it reached Tyler up in Michigan too.

A long quiet

Even with the miles between us, we kept talking online, AIM and then MSN Messenger, and later through Facebook, until a couple of things lined up: the distance, and everyone slowly souring on Facebook, and the thread just went quiet. The last I’d heard, he was off to Michigan State for something like aerospace engineering. We crossed paths maybe once or twice. I remember him stopping by my community college once and the two of us hanging out for ten minutes, me mostly just glad to see him.

Then nothing, for a long time. His name is common enough that every time I tried to find him online, I got nowhere. I made my peace with it, sort of. I figured friends drift, friendships aren’t always forever, and I hoped that wherever he was, he was doing well.

Finding him again

In 2020, when the pandemic shut everything down and I started feeling isolated, I got the urge to check on old friends. I went looking for Tyler again, and this time I found a thread to pull: he had worked on a piece of software at a large tech company, and there was an interview where he talked about it. I traced the company, found an email, and sent a note. He wrote back.

We’ve talked almost every week since. He doesn’t live in Missouri (I’ll leave it at “a long way away”), and we still haven’t managed to be in the same place in person yet. None of that has gotten in the way. We’ve rebuilt the whole thing and then some. We play a lot of Satisfactory, and a lot of Deep Rock Galactic, the mining game with the “Rock and Stone” battle cry. We get on voice chat and trade problems and wins and advice, and mostly we just goof off. The best part of this friendship has always been that almost nothing is too serious. We can joke about anything. It’s the most open, honest, easy friendship I have, and at this point it has been running for more than twenty-five years.

Who he turned out to be

He told me once that those early days messing around on the computer together nudged him toward what he does now, which is software development. I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t make me a little proud. He’s also become relentlessly capable. He solves Rubik’s cubes for fun. He rock climbs and mountain bikes and is probably in better shape now, pushing forty, than he’s ever been. He’s an explorer in the literal sense: I’m pretty sure he’s set foot in every state and stood on the highest point of each one, which it turns out is a whole hobby with a name. He’s generous with his time and quick to help. At one point he taught himself Ukrainian and put real work into helping people affected by the war there. He is, genuinely, one of the kindest and most understanding people I know.

Cheers, Tyler

So this one is simple. Tyler, if you ever read this: thank you for being my friend. Thank you for coming into my life that summer, and for coming back into it, and for always making room for my particular brand of silliness. I’m grateful you give me the time of day, and I’m looking forward to getting older and seeing where both of our stories go. Maybe someday I’ll write the update.

Cheers, buddy. Here’s to the next twenty-five.