The Arlington Connection

Some years back I learned of a completely unsuspected connection to Midland that reaches back 55 years.

Pictured here are two of my oldest (and dearest) friends -- quite literally oldest because I met them when I was only three years old. We lived in Arlington VA then, the first place I remember though my family and I had already moved from Virginia to New Mexico to Michigan and back to Virginia. The area is called Fairlington and we lived in one of the rowhouses there. I cannot find a spot on a map that matches my memory and the photo or two I have, nor could I find it when I drove around it once so I guess it was demolished when the freeway or some nearby industry was built.

So, it's early morning and I'm out & about, and this man comes out of the rowhouse across the way, heading to work in military uniform.

I must have been a nuisance with my squirtgun that day because my mother had told me that the next time I squirted somebody with it, I had to give it to him.

Col. Fred didn't quite know what to make of this little boy who squirts him... and then hands him the squirtgun! But we became friends --or I sort of became the child he and Caroline never had-- and I have many happy memories since of the sawdust smell of his wood-working shop, his little gas-powered cars, trips on the Potomac on his boat, watching TV while Caroline prepared a snack, and the taste of Coca-Cola in the mid-50s (very different from today, but I sometimes still encounter the old taste overseas), and so very much more.

They came to visit us not long after we moved to Midland but I have few memories of it; most of the visiting was with my parents.

In California I lost touch (along with so many things) and did not find them again until the late 90s, thanks to the Internet, and Kathy and I stopped in Florida to visit for a couple of days on my way to meetings somewhere on the East Coast. Caroline passed away not too long after that, and Fred a few years later. They are now interred together in Arlington National Cemetery, no more than three miles from where we first met so long ago, and when I can I visit to pay my respects.

I flew to D.C. from Seattle to attend Fred's funeral. At lunch afterwards I learned what I'd never known: that Caroline's family was from the Bay City area and she has a relative (can't be a sister, maybe a niece?) who is a Midland realtor! I still have her card. If I remember correctly, at the time she lived just a few houses off my route to Eastlawn and MHS.

Gwen, you have e-mail.