The Grand (Andy) Teton

Hello again, Dear Readers.  I know.  It’s been a while since you heard from me.

I apologize for the delay but Life has a way of throwing us curve balls when we least expect them and since last December, I’ve had a couple that beaned me right in the head and threw me off my game.

Man plans and God laughs.

Thank you all for sticking with me.

Which leads me to back to a time when Life wasn’t so difficult to navigate.

1967.

1967 was maybe the best year of my life.

I had it made in the shade.  I was a senior at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois.  (Not New Trier East or West.  Just one and only New Trier. 4700 kids in the school. 1200 in our class alone. We were The Indians back then and proud of it! (Who knew from Political Correctness?)

I loved, my friends, my friends, my friends, my social life and most of my teachers and classes.

I hated gym and missing school.  I never wanted to stay away.

My brother and I called our house “The Locker Room.”  The WORST punishment my mother could dole out was grounding me- second only to ripping my phone out of the wall.  My mother would tear my princess phone out by its roots so much that the Bell Telephone repair guy got to be a real friend of the family.

Sidebar:  My brother maintains that even now, he still has enough dirt on me to get my mother to  come back from the grave and ground me.  Something about stealing the family car without a license and picking up hitchhiker Skip Otto…

My boyfriend – and very soon-to-be-husband Billy Spatz was one year ahead of me in school. Class of ’66.  And he was away at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for his Frosh year.

That meant that I had the best of both worlds.  I could visit him every other weekend and get a really fun taste of college frat boy party life.

AND I could finally pick my own boy friends and have fully-mother-sanctioned-and approved FUN with the opposite sex.

Billy wasn’t jealous, my mother (who loved him herself) was happy and I was delirious with freedom of choice.

And then the Universe handed me a big kiss on the lips.

Somehow, among the 4700 kids, I found the grand Andrew Teton.

(I bet you thought I’d never get around to him, didn’t you?)

I can’t remember how we first met.  We must have been in a class together senior year.  But Fate threw us together and for me, at least, it was love at first laugh.

Andy was wildly creative, mischievous and unusual.  An outside-the-box kind of guy.

In short, he was an unicorn.

Like me.

Take his Wake Up Machine, for example.

Andy had put a tape recorder into his room and set it on a timer.  It would go off every morning and get him up for school.

I thought it was the ultimate in high tech.  But then I heard the tape.

It was his mother SCREAMING at him, “Andrew, get up!  Andy, wake up!  Andrew, get up!!!!!”

Then I thought it was the ultimate in hysterical.

But it wasn’t that Andy was funny and different.  We both just clicked, bonded, flipped for the same books, movies, music and most importantly, this.

Every Friday night, I’d go over to his house and we would hunker down in the den to watch Mrs. Peel and John Steed do their delightful ballet à deux cleverly playful satire on the then wildly popular torrent of James Bond spoofs, spy movies and tv shows.

We also had adventures of our own.  We’d walk the beautiful Wilmette Beach at night- weather permitting.  It was so different than the crowded, loud, token-wearing kid and mom-infested place we knew during the day.

Wilmette Beach at night was enchanted- and enchanting.  It was filled with haunting dunes and crazy shapes that were dimly-glimpsed by glasses-wearing Andy and blind-as-a bat-but no-glasses allowed-night blind me.

We’d roam around in a world of our own. We were the only people on the sand dunes.

One night, Andy suggested that we sit on a large piece of driftwood.  It looked like it could hold two comfortably so we made our way over to it and sat down.

It was a cozy beach couch and we felt right at home- for about a second.

Then the couch began to buck and rear and much to our dismay, it started to stand up.

And it was yelling.

We two escapees from The Hadley Institute for the Blind had sat on top of…well, in the parlance of the day…two people um… “doing it” under a blanket.

We actually never saw the girl.  All I know is one minute we were seated and the next moment we were running for our lives.

The guy was chasing us, pulling up his pants and cursing all at the same time.

We were running away as fast as we could and I would have made it back to Andy’s house if he hadn’t turned back at me and yelled’ “Let’s hope he wasn’t using the withdrawal method.”

That tore it.

I was felled by helpless laughter.   Luckily, the guy decided that he had better things to do than murder dopey us so he turned back and headed back for to finish his unfinished girlfriend business.

Andy and I did more than stroll on the beach, though.  We cut school to see movies and buy record albums.

I’m pretty sure on May 26, 1967, we ditched afternoon classes and I bought this.

It changed my life.  This album had the words to the songs actually printed on the back of the album.  No longer would I have to get up off my bed, and CAREFULLY replace the arm of my little record player exactly on the grove of the track if I wanted to know what The Beatles were actually saying.

Which I painstakingly did with Meet The Beatles, Beatles ’65, Rubber Soul et al.

In 1967, when Andy and I were friends, it was a simpler time.  A time in our lives when sex hadn’t reared its complicated head, a time when a friendship between a boy and and a girl could leave that messy part out and just be fun.

Maybe we were naive.  Maybe we just were young and innocent. Maybe, well, Life back then was full of simple joys like movies and new Beatle albums and walks on the beach and we were seventeen and nothing bad could ever happen to anyone.

Not like today.

Now I’m all grown up and Life has put me – and probably lots of you- through some pretty hard tests.  We’ve learned some tough lessons about love and loss and illness and death and divorce and…

Well, I don’t have to tell you guys.

We’re not seventeen anymore and nobody has escaped some hardship or trouble.

But a funny thing happened on the way to this post.  I had started it last year before the you-know-what hit the fan.

So I stopped.

And then, out of the blue, last weekend, I got an email from…

Andrew Teton himself!

I hadn’t heard from him since 1967- although we did see each other for a fun, fleeting moment at our last reunion.

What are the odds that I had been writing about him and then HEARD from him?

(Math majors help me out here.)

Maybe we are still unicorns in sync with each other and Time and Space play no part in our friendship.

Who knows?

All I can say is thanks, my friend.

Nice hearing from you.

And Steed, don’t wait another fifty-six years to get in touch.  You are needed.

Love, Mrs. Peel