Some days, the past rings your bell

One of the odd and interesting things about living in pretty much the same area as where you grew up is that you never know when a name from the past will pop up, and you never know in what context. I was off in another part of the state during my 20s, but had friends here who could keep me up to date on who was in the police blotter, who was getting married, who had finally left Scotia, etc. When I moved back here, I developed the habit of looking at the obituaries, because every now and then someone I knew from the hometown would pop up — a parent of someone I went to school with, someone whose lawn I had cut or windows I had washed, a second-grade teacher from my elementary school. (One of the oddest things, especially with the teachers, was that they were now dying only in their 70s and 80s, when they had seemed to my young eyes to have been at least a hundred years old back then.)

And what’s odd is how sometimes that news can really wrench me back in time. Just a couple of years ago, the father of the kids I grew up across the street from died. It seemed like everyone who lived or ever had lived in Scotia showed up for that funeral — it was the closest thing to a reunion of the kids I grew up with that I’ve ever been to.

And then this weekend came the news that Dick Fyvie died in a fire in his home. As a teenage boy growing up in a small village, we knew the names of all the police — it was just considered required knowledge. But Dick Fyvie would have been the only one I could still have remembered today. It seems incredible that he could only have been 65 (in fact my mother was shocked to learn he was younger than she by a year). He was one of those guys who just seemed to always be everywhere in the community, both on the job and off. Everybody knew him. And as a policeman, he was the model of what a village cop should be — firm, fair, and reasonable. We weren’t the kinds of kids who got into any real trouble — there were some old ladies who liked to call the cops on us because they thought we were harassing “their” raccoons, for instance — but whenever we had to deal with him, we knew we were going to be listened to and treated fairly. Thinking about him again really took me back to those long summer nights, teenage boys on bicycles looking for something to do, moving from the corner store up to school yard, over to somebody’s porch, up to the park — just staying on the move, keeping out of trouble, kinda wishing there would be some. And the police car coming through every now and then, just keeping an eye out.

The world we grew up in — a place where it was considered safe and fine for kids to wander free throughout the town — that doesn’t exist anymore. And I’m sorry to mark the passing of one of the people who was a part of it.