My First, Best Friend - Scott Dalitzky 1960-2014

My first best friend in the world passed away Monday. An old neighbor sought me out to share the news sensing, correctly, that I’d want to know. (Scott's obituary: https://tinyurl.com/l3n5zs8)

After I moved away from the first town I grew up in, Longmeadow, Mass., more than 40 years ago I gradually lost touch with the “gang” on Wilkin Drive – Betsy, Judy, Marjorie, and Scott. The memories of those years are Norman Rockwell-esque in my mind. We discovered the world without the benefit of the Internet or smartphones.

It was my pre-teen years, but it seemed like a lifetime of adventures packed into less than a decade. Household appliances became the controls of spaceships and sofa cushions became forts. Scott was my best bud and we had the run of what, in retrospect, was a pretty amazing neighborhood.

We played “run the bases” with the neighborhood crowd dashing between two trees in the Hoff’s backyard while throwing a baseball. Don’t ask me what the rules were. I don’t remember.

We played spin the bottle in the Fieldman’s basement. (Shocking!) We played pinball in the Feldman’s basement listening to “Magic Carpet Ride” on the jukebox. The jukebox! A pinball machine!

We played hide and seek all over the place and recreated the Olympics and Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin in Betsy Robinson’s basement. We explored the gaps in the walls in the basement of Scott’s house – secret passageways for us!

The Grinspoons, the Hoffs, the Epsteins. Scott and I went to camp together. We chased girls and we may have kissed a few, yes even at that young age.

This was pre-texting and pre-sexting so all was pretty innocent – after all, we really had no idea what we were doing. We just liked girls and chased them. Of course, up until second grade they had chased us.

When I reconnected with Scott at various times I was envious. Scott got the MBA I never did. Scott had the career in packaged goods (Lever Brothers, Gillette) that mystified me. Scott was always better with the ladies than I, but did settle down and have a son.

When I last connected with Scott he told me about creating commercials in Brazil where actors shaved their entire heads. It sounded like huge fun to me.

But by this point in Scott’s life, 5-6 years ago, he was unemployed, had been through rehab a couple of times, had had brain surgery and had lost his driver’s license. There were still elements of the ebullient, high-spirited Scott I had known. But it was clear some dark forces were at work and he was wrestling with them with good intentions and mixed results.

The truth is, when you slip off the rails in life you can become a magnet for misfortune, which is what seems to have happened to Scott. Small, bad decisions leading to worse and worse outcomes.

I don’t know how or why Scott’s life took a downturn. There seemed to be a lot of love there to pull him through from his parents, wife (Carol) and son.

Around the time Scott was getting clean I was also making a decision to stop drinking alcohol. Scott wasn’t the reason but he was a reason for me to stop. (I had some visits of my own to the dark side.)

But not knowing much about those latter years I prefer to remember the earlier ones digging tunnels in the woods and playing pranks on his younger sister, Nancy, or rallying around a friend who might be down. Why be unhappy? We were young and having too much fun to be unhappy.

I am hard pressed to remember a single unpleasant moment from that time in Longmeadow on Wilkin Drive. I do remember being or feeling very competitive with Scott, as often happens with your best friend.

We were given a summer math workbook by our second grade teacher – I want to say it was Mrs. Priest. I told Scott I had finished the first chapter. He claimed he had completed the whole workbook. Not to be outdone, I did the same.

Turns out Scott was just bluffing. Mrs. Priest rewarded me by giving me a bigger, harder workbook to tide me over the summer. Needless to say, since Scott hadn’t been given this workbook, I never picked it up. It only mattered if it were a bone of contention between us.

Scott, to me, always was the embodiment of energy, confidence and guile. I use those words in the most positive sense possible. I expect that positive spirit lives on in his son, Eric. I don’t know, but I suspect Scott was showing Eric how to golf. I do remember Scott showing me his hole-in-one trophy. (Hole-in-one! Beat me again.)

I was glad to have reconnected with Scott, even if there was a little sadness that he was no longer out there raising the bar for me. I guess the best part is I never really saw the dark side, I only saw him in his younger days and working his way back in recovery. And that is how I will remember him – that and a decade of pre-teen adventures that seemed like a lifetime, and a charmed one at that.