Adventures With Jeff

I wrote a while back about one of my boyhood friends named Jeff and how we burned down his house. We had a few other adventures I figured I would recall to round out our time together. After the fire some of the smoke damaged furniture that Jeff’s mom wanted to save was stored in the garage, which instantly transformed it into a neighborhood clubhouse. A few pieces of furniture were soon pulled out into the yard next to the garage to help air them out. Not long after that happened it occurred to us that we might as well jump off of the garage, landing on the furniture in the yard. That evolved into dragging the furniture further and further away so eventually we had to run along the length of the garage and leap off of it in order to hit our targets. We would run and jump then smash into a davenport with such force it would flip over backwards and we would roll off the other side. Needless to say that furniture never made it back into the house. As long as I knew him Jeff had a fascination with flying, vowing someday he would have his own plane to fly. For a few weeks he was even making plans to build a spaceship. On the sidewalk in front of his house we would build a homemade ramp to jump our bicycles, the incline increasing with each jump until someone suffered a spectacular crash. Then we would start over with the small ramp and raise it up again. One summer we decided to build a raft using only logs and vines. A few yards after shoving it into the Des Moines river it came apart and we had to swim for shore. Occasionally I would spend the night at his house, and one night we snuck out headed for a local apartment complex that had a pool. We silently scaled the locked fence surrounding the pool and quietly went for a swim. There were few lights on around the pool and I remember floating in that deep blue water looking up at the brilliant scattered stars. Early one morning when I had spent the night we woke to deliver the newspapers on his route and the radio told us about the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash. We eventually drifted apart and he moved away. The last I heard a few years ago, from an elderly lady in the old neighborhood, Jeff was living a successful life in Kansas City. When she mentioned he owned his own plane I had to smile.