In 7th grade, class teams were the school district’s first public attempt to separate the smart from the not so smart. They were F1, F2, A3, L1, L2, L3, R1 and R2. The highest level was F1, which meant you’d be taking French. The lowest was R2. Those students spent most of their time honing their reading skills. I was in L1, which was the higher end of the mediocre students, which was pretty much where I should have been placed. There I met a boy who I befriended and ended up getting along with extremely well. His name was Johnny Kurtz. He couldn’t have been more different than what I was used to. He was Catholic. His father owned and ran his own chainsaw sales and repair business right behind his house in the middle of the country. The Kurtz’s owned over 300 acres. Johnny had asthma, so he needed an air conditioner in his bedroom. This was a big deal back then. Few people had air conditioners in their houses in 1965, let alone one in their bedroom. When I think about why we got along so well was that we both felt disconnected from the teen world we just entered. We also shared the love of cars, music, and girls. He was funny and had a great self-deprecating sense of humor. Normally a quiet guy on the surface, he would come out with some of the funniest things I ever heard. He also had a quiet sense of decency, honesty, and generosity, as well as an admirable work ethic that I respected. His family was friendly, grounded, and really salt of the earth types. Not something I was used to with a preppy father, living in a suburb, and going to a liberal church in snobby Princeton. At Johnny’s house we must have played the Game of Life a thousand times. We imagined what our lives would actually be like in the future while listening to The Rolling Stones or The Animals on his hi-fi. We would walk through his vast fields and pick off dozens of ticks afterwards. That’s when I realized for the first time that am most happy when I’m just with a person or two. I’m not much of a big party animal type. My friendship with Kurtz grew as we both aged into adulthood. When he stayed at my house we would walk through the streets of Pennington until three in the morning, talking about girls, teachers, and our arch enemies, The Fish. The Fish were a gang of guys who lived in a neighborhood about a mile from my house. They were a year younger than us. Unlike us, they smoked and drank, and for some reason really hated our guts. Despite the amount of time we spent talking about them, fantasizing what we would do to them if they ever bothered us, it never amounted to anything. Kind of like the girls we never asked out, and the cars we never drove. Such is the Game of Life, I guess.