A Funeral for a Friend

Hiram Hot Stove League baseball (1958?)
Andy Krauss is second from the left, back row.
I'm on his left.
Dick Szabo is on my left.
Dan Earley, who remained Andy's close and devoted friend for decades (and who told
me of Andy's death), is in the front, far left.

It was a lovely day for Andy's funeral--a good day for baseball, and Andy would have loved that. Although it drizzled a bit as I drove from my home in Hudson to the funeral home just outside Mantua, it had stopped by the time I arrived and eased my car into the line that would form the procession afterwards.

As I wrote here the other day, Andy Krauss was a great friend and teammate from Hiram High School days (I graduated in 1962; he, the next year). We had played baseball and basketball together throughout junior high and high school years. And that--as you former players know--creates a bond that lasts a long, long time.

The room for the service was full--people of all ages--family, friends. The grateful. I sat with Paul Dreisbach, another long-ago HHS friend, and soon it all commenced. A young minister took us through the relevant scriptural passages about death, about heaven. He shared a few stories, memories of Andy.

Afterward, I met some of Andy's family members for the first time: his wife and a son who looked so much like young Andy that I stuttered when I spoke with him.

A neighbor from boyhood, Karen Zuver, introduced herself, too, and we laughed a bit about her dog from Back Then, Rodney, a critter I remember so well. I had to walk right by the Zuvers', coming and going from school each day.

And then ... the procession to the cemetery in Hiram, on the town's western edge, lying alongside Ryder Road (which we kids always called "Cemetery Road"). I parked, walked down to near the southern edge of the cemetery. Andy's spot. The service there was quick--with taps and military honors (Andy had served in the Army). From where I stood, I could look at Ryder Road disappearing into the south, the fields and trees that seemed unchanged from my boyhood.

As I was leaving, a man stopped me. It was Dick Szabo, another long-ago baseball and basketball teammate. I hadn't seen him in over fifty years. We did some quick catching up, and I commented about the view. It could be 1956 ... looking out there ... 1956.

We parted, and I drove on up Ryder Road, turned west on Pioneer Trail, stopping at the Monroe Farm to buy some of their maple syrup to take to my brothers. (Joyce and I are heading out to see them this week--and to celebrate my mom's 98th birthday.) We've bought fruit and syrup there since 1956, when, not quite 12, I moved with my family from Oklahoma to Hiram, where my dad would teach at the college, my mom at nearby James A. Garfield High School. My older brother and I would both graduate from Hiram High and Hiram College.

I continued on west on Pioneer Trail--a road that still looks much as it did back in my boyhood--all the way to Aurora, where I spent most of my career teaching in the middle school.

Tears were my companion on that drive home. For Hiram, for Pioneer Trail, for Aurora, for the past (which poet A. E. Housman called "the land of lost content"), and for Andy Krauss, a wonderful friend from boyhood, a wonderful man whose death drew to Mantua, to the cemetery, a host of people to say Thank you for all he had done for them.

And as for me? When I think of Andy, as I mentioned the other day, I think of him sprinting across the outfield, eyes on the ball, realizing he's going to get there in time, making the catch, whirling to throw the ball to the infield, trotting back to his position, knowing he has done well.

Oh, yes, he has done well. So very very well.