Just because you can come home again...

It was one of the first days of Ms. Payne's second-grade class.

I don't remember exactly what he was wearing, but it was August 1982 and South Carolina, so it was probably a pair of too-short shorts and some tall white tube socks making up the difference. 

I do remember that he was already sobbing when he walked through the door. This wasn't his school. These weren't his classmates. This wasn't his teacher.

He was a transfer student, coming in after the school year had started and at least a year after the rest of us had gotten to know one another. Everything had settled down for the rest of us.

We knew Oak Grove Elementary School, from the playground to the music basement to the library, like the back of our grubby little caterpillar-seizing hands.

We knew exactly where we sat in class (between Tripp Taylor and Darren Woodlief for me).

And we knew where the in-classroom bathroom was hidden behind the ABC posters.

We didn't know him.

Lucky for us, Andy Strickland was placed nearly in alphabetical order (between Darren and me), and we were seated near each other in our tiny brown desks with the cubby underneath for the rest of the year. And the next year. And the next year. And so on. And so forth.

We got in trouble in third grade by creating our first newspaper on my Tandy TRS-80 and naming Jeff Cooper the week's worst-dressed. Ms. Smith took us out in the hall and we learned that the first amendment didn't apply to us in 1983.

We got in trouble in seventh grade by spending more time passing composition notebooks back and forth to one another, with me supplying the story plot and Andy serving as illustrator.

We got in trouble in high school as we worked together at the school newspaper and the Dispatch-News for doing things best going unmentioned. The same goes for our first years over at USC.

We fought over girls. He introduced me to Jimmy Buffett on the way to a high school football game in 1991. We hid from the police.

And so on. And so forth.

But for the past 17 years, we haven't lived near each other. I finished school while he went into the U.S. Navy. I worked in Spartanburg while he finished his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Columbia and Raleigh, N.C. He moved to Nashville, Tenn., and I moved to Virginia and then back to Lexington.

We both have families. We both have tough jobs. We don't see each other or talk to one another as much as we should. But I love him and miss him dearly. And I hope he knows that.

Because he is my longest-serving friend, ever since that day he came crying into Ms. Payne's second-grade class. All alone. And scared. But willing to look for friends in the likes of Darren and Tripp and dozens of other students who came to care deeply about him.

Why on Earth, you're probably wondering, am I writing about him today? No, he didn't die. No, I don't think we're coming out of our closets.

Today, my 6-year-old son Charlie, is heading to first grade in Ms. Enright's class at Pleasant Hill Elementary School. Nineteen of the 21 students in that class were in kindergarten at the school a year ago. They're friends. They know where the cafeteria and the recess grounds and the bathrooms are.

I've thought more in the past two months than I ever have before about how Andy Strickland must have felt on that hot day in August 1982. He had no idea what was awaiting him and what was going to happen next. But he was so brave.

I can only hope that Charlie can summon some of that strength today as he walks into a similar situation. I know he's excited, but I also know he's nervous. I hope he finds classmates that will mean as much to him over the next 30 years as Andy does to me. No matter what else happens, I hope for that.

Will there be tears? Definitely.

But probably not from Charlie.