When was the last time you thought about the person you called your best friend when you were in the fifth grade? If you’re mid-way through your thirties, as I am, you probably don’t think about your grade school pals very often at all. Maybe once or twice a year. Maybe less than that. It was so very long ago, after all, and a grown-up life is so very busy and filled with distractions. It’s hard to find time to think about your current friends, let alone those you haven’t seen in decades.

Today, however, I’ve been thinking a lot about my fifth-grade best friend. His name was Shaun Sheppick. He lived just down the street from me, southwards, near the place where Redwood Road bulges up and over a low hill. I had to cross the street to reach his house. My mother always warned me to be extra-careful when I went down there because that hill could hide oncoming traffic from unwary pedestrians. (Mom always feared that I would be hit by a car while crossing the street. I think if she could have arranged it, I would have spent my entire life on our side of Redwood, existing in a long, linear world free from the dangers of speeding cars and pick-up trucks.)

Shaun and I didn’t have very much in common, which is probably why our friendship did not endure. By the fifth grade, I was already a bookworm and cinephile who mostly lived inside my own head. I spent a lot of my leisure time in front of the TV, and I was interested in science fiction, space exploration, and ancient Egypt — subjects that were tainted with the smell of “geek.” Shaun was different. He came from a family of outdoorsmen; his father was a farmer and a hunter. By the fifth grade, he already knew how to fire a gun and dress out a deer, skills that remain arcane mysteries to me even now. I remember him as a lean, rangy kid, taller and stronger than me. He was good looking in a blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth sort of way, with a strong jaw, a thick head of hair, and downturned eyes that gave him a perpetually sleepy expression.

I don’t remember how we became friends. It seems like one day we simply were, and then, after a while, we weren’t. As for why we became friends, I think it was mostly a matter of proximity. My previous best friend, Glen Brown — who had lived up the street in the opposite direction — moved away and left me with no one my own age to hang out with. Shaun lived close by and we were in the same class at school, so he was the obvious choice to replace Glen.

Shaun was one of the cool kids. At least he always seemed cool to me. His parents didn’t have a lot of money — very few people in my hometown of Riverton did back then — but he was the sort that didn’t give a damn about things like that. He was sure of himself and didn’t worry about whether he was wearing the right clothes, as I always did. He also had a bit of a wild streak, as I recall. He frequently hung out with a older kid named Lance, and although they never got into any real trouble that I know about, there was always an alluring whiff of danger in the air when Lance was around.

It was Shaun who taught me to use the curse words that I’d heard but never dared to utter myself. It was Shaun who told me that you could often find unsold comic books in the dumpster behind Riverton Drug. It was in Shaun’s barn that I saw my first nudie magazine (probably on loan from Lance). And it was Shaun’s idea to try making ourselves a pair of corncob pipes, just like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Lucky for us, we never quite dared to smoke the corn silk that we’d planned to use as tobacco — God only knows how sick that might have made us — but we did get as far as making the pipes, and we clenched them firmly in our teeth as we wandered around his dad’s pastures in the lazy afternoons of late summer.

As shocking as those memories might seem to our mothers, Shaun wasn’t a bad kid, and he wasn’t trying to make me into a bad kid. We were just kids, doing what kids used to do before the world changed and everything seemed to become much more dangerous and high-stakes than it was back in the 1970s. It was a good time to be young, and Shaun was the sort of friend an introverted boy like me needed.

It wasn’t meant to last, though. I can still remember the day I told him I thought we were drifting apart — a phrase I’d picked up from my mom, one that was entirely too sophisticated for a boy my age to be using. Shaun mocked me, told me that I was weird, that I always said weird things. He seemed angry, and I’ve never quite understood why. Was it because I really was a weird kid and I’d made him uncomfortable? Maybe. Or maybe it was because he knew exactly what I was talking about and he didn’t like it any better than I did. Whatever the reason, I didn’t hang out with him much after that.

When the next academic year started, Shaun and I were in middle school. Our world suddenly expanded far beyond what we’d known at the old Riverton Elementary. We were surrounded by new people, more people than we’d ever seen before, and we were faced with the strange new challenges of multiple class periods and P.E. instead of recess. I enrolled in advanced courses that would eventually lead me to college, and soon I made new friends whose interests more closely matched my own. It wasn’t long before Shaun was just a face in the crowd. I can’t recall the last time I saw him.

This morning I read in the paper that my best friend from fifth grade died in his sleep this past Monday. He was a few weeks past his thirty-fifth birthday, a husband and father of twin girls, a member of the Mormon Church. In the photo that accompanied his obituary, he looks much like I remember. Like me, he’d filled out upon reaching maturity and he wore a beard, but if we’d passed each other on the street, neither of us would have had the slightest difficulty recognizing the other. No doubt we would have stopped, asked how the other was doing, made a fuss about exchanging phone numbers or email addresses, and threatened to get together sometime to catch up, all the while knowing that we would never actually go through with it. In my experience, it is rare to bump into someone you knew as a child and still find enough common ground to carry you beyond the basic pleasantries. Shaun and I never had that much in common to begin with. But he was my friend. For a brief period of time, he was my best friend. And I mourn his loss