“The coldest winter I ever spent,” Mark Twain is credited with quipping, “was a summer in San Francisco.”

The great writer apparently never spent an autumn day at a Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) game, in the old Municipal Stadium, with an arctic-like wind whipping in off Lake Erie. Nine innings at nine-below-zero is how I recall an abominable day when I was eight.

I have long forgotten whom the Tribe was even playing, but I remember rushing to the men’s room more frequently than an elderly man with a troubled prostrate – not to use the urinal, but because there were electric heaters on the ceiling.

It was my first time to a Major League Baseball game and since you can’t watch a home run from the men’s room, when the Indians came to bat I would trek back to my seat like Robert Peary braving the elements on the way to the North Pole.

By the bottom of fifth inning, I was rooting for the Indians to go down 1-2-3 so I could seek warm refuge again.

By the seventh-inning stretch-and-shiver, I had stuffed crumpled pages from the game program inside my sweatshirt for insulation like a homeless person using a newspaper as a blanket on a Twain-ian summer night in San Francisco.

“Hey, Mom,” I mumbled from blue lips when I got home. “Check out the souvenir I got.”

Mom, excitedly: “You caught a foul ball?”
Me, with teeth chattering: “N-n-n-no, I caught frostbite!”

In the half century since, I have never felt colder. And yet the other day, in our Pacific paradise, my mind flashed Erie-ily back to Cleveland’s “Mistake on the Lake” Stadium.

A friend and I had planned to get together at a local brewery. However, with coronavirus surging we decided – despite both of us being fully vaccinated and boosted – to instead meet up outdoors at a park.

Rain threatened our new picnic-table plan. Indeed, I got soaked and chilled to the bones on my daily run beforehand. Then the clouds suddenly parted and our happy hour was happily back on.

I thought I was bundled up sufficiently in my cozy “Ol’ Green” Patagonia wool pullover – that, coincidentally, my friend’s wife expertly darned a hole – over a long-sleeved shirt. Alas, as the Lake Erie-like coastal breeze began to pick up, and the temperature fell into the 40s, I began to shiver.

“You’re freezing,” my friend said. “We should go.”

“N-n-n-no, I’m fine,” I replied stubbornly, not wanting to cut our visit short. I was reminded of when my son was 5 or thereabouts. At his favorite buffet restaurant he always filled a bowl with a Matterhorn of vanilla soft-serve frozen yogurt and before even half-finishing his teeth would start chattering, his body shivered in the air conditioning, but he kept on devouring the treat.

That is how I felt now. I wanted to keep eating up our conversation even as my shivers persisted. As great a storyteller as my friend is, and supreme listener as well, here is an example of what makes him a friend of friends: with a summer-bright smile he offered me his winter coat …

… and when I politely declined he took it off nonetheless and wrapped me in it.

I am not exaggerating when I say it is The Warmest Coat that I have ever worn. Putting it on was like easing into a steamy bath. I think it must be stuffed with polar bear fur and penguin feathers and infused with the hot-chocolate breath of unicorns.

Warmer than any coat, of course, is a great friendship.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

My new memoir WOODEN & ME is also available here at Amazon

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Friendship Trumps Time and Separation

Tennessee Williams was spot-on when he observed, “Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation.”

Rarely has this been more clear personally than earlier this week when I met up with a boyhood friend I had not seen in a dozen years, if not more. Before that, it had been nearly as long again between reunions.

Jimmy and me: a poor picture of a rich friendship!

Prior to these long lapses, however, during our “Wonder Years,” Jimmy and I were thick as thieves, or scamps, or Tom and Huck. He was, in fact, my first friend upon moving to Ventura from Ohio at age 12.

Jimmy, four months my junior, wasn’t my friend so much as my “cousin” of which I have not a single biological one. Had he lived in Ventura, or I in Pasadena, we would have been “brothers.”

We first met because Jimmy’s aunt and uncle were my godparents. Each summer he stayed two weeks at their Solimar beach home and upon arriving here in 1972 I joined him. It became a yearly rendezvous through our teens.

Those beach days and nights were boyhood bliss. We stayed up late shooting pool and watching TV, slept in long, then spent the remaining sunlight in the waves and exploring tide pools, looking for seashells and ocean glass, playing basketball and talking about girls.

Too, I would annually stay a week with Jimmy and his mom – his father died when Jimmy was 4 and his only sibling, a sister, was 10 years older and already out of the house – in Pasadena. Summer at the beach is an idyllic playground that is hard to equal, but these vacations came close.

Jimmy was a California beach boy straight from Central Casting, with a toothpaste-ad smile, longish platinum hair, and a tan the color of an old penny. But his most striking feature, it always seemed to me, was his laugh.

Even at age 12, his laugh sounded like it came from an old man with emphysema – imagine Billy Crystal doing an out-of-breath character in a Brooklyn deli. Better yet, recall the wonderful hearty snicker of Muttley, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon dog. That was Jimmy’s laugh and he used it readily.

Separation of 70 miles – Jimmy still lives near Pasadena – is no excuse for the years of severance we allowed to pass.

Our last time together was when we saw John Wooden give a talk at the historic Pasadena Civic Center. Jimmy and I shared many similarities growing up and near top of the list was our idolization of the Wizard of Westwood. Indeed, we both went to Coach Wooden’s summer basketball camp and memorized every block in the Pyramid of Success.

Too bad we neglected Wooden’s preaching to “make friendship a fine art” – at least with each other. Annually our Christmas cards echoed sentiments to rekindle our friendship in the New Year, but we kept failing to keep the promise.

Taking the “Initiative” – a block in Wooden’s Pyramid – Jimmy’s 2014 holiday card included wishes of “Peace, Love & Joy” and a specific date in January to meet. When I walked into Brendan’s Irish Pub & Restaurant in Agoura Hills – a midway drive for both of us – the sight of my old friend was a time machine making me young again.

Our 15-year separation might as well have been five minutes. We picked up as if we had just been in the middle of a conversation before one of us left to go to the bathroom – the latter happening a number of times on this evening, causing Jimmy to say, “I guess we are in our fifties and not teenagers anymore.”

An anticipated hour visit lasted nearly four as we reminisced and caught up on wives and kids, work and play, and raised our glasses to the shared loved ones we have lost – his cousin and my second “sister”; his aunt and my godmother; his mom and my mom.

Bidding goodbye, Jimmy and I made plans for another hello very soon, and these words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow came to mind: “Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend.”

And the hug and the Muttley laugh, too.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Check out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”

• Personalized signed copies are available at WoodyWoodburn.com
• Unsigned paperbacks or Kindle ebook can be purchased here at Amazon