Remembering Derik

One day when I was a kid, my dad told me “Derik’s not always going to wait around for you.” He already knew what I did not — that my best friend was about to move far away. A few days later, I learned that Derik and his family were moving to Florida.

I thought of this when my mom called me a few weeks ago to tell me of Derik’s passing.

I have a scar on my left hand from the day he moved. I cut myself on a chain link fence in the yard as they were packing up the moving van.

When he was a kid, Derik abducted the baby Jesus from the St Lawrence nativity scene. The priest could not figure out what was happening — the baby would disappear from time to time and always return. Turns out, Derik was taking the little plastic Jesus on walks around the block in his wagon. He was a kid people remembered. He made himself known.

We used to ride bikes from one end of Ironton to the other. He’d come up to my house on 11th Street and insist we get on our bikes and go visit people. We would ride up to Mary Lintner’s house or Bob and Norma Compton’s house and just shoot the breeze. As an 11-year-old kid, he wanted to go sit on people’s porches and chat. His personality was beyond his years.

His dad had a furniture store — Woods Furniture. We would make ourselves at home in the furniture showrooms. Back then Zenith was a tv brand to brag about and Intellivision was a new game system. Derik would greet customers as if he owned the place. The Woods Furniture warehouse at the end of Railroad Street was our playground. We’d climb up on the shelves and jump off onto the mattresses on the floor. Even then, he lived wide open.

We watched the movie “Halloween” and then spent a weekend at his Grandpa Coster’s cabin out by Lake Vesuvius fretting that our demise was around every bend — scaring each other the way kids do.

One year at church camp in West Virginia, he decided to get baptized. I resisted. I told him I didn’t want him to do it. That it meant we would be grown up for real. He insisted. I came around a couple months later as did my dad, who was also moved by Derik’s decision. That was the way it was — Derik did things first.

It’s gut wrenching to think about the times he and I would talk as kids. We would talk about our futures. What we wanted to do. He wanted to play tennis. I wanted to be an oceanographer or something I’ve since forgotten. I think we both wanted to be his older brother, Donnie. We’d take his worn out, hand-me-down tennis rackets and treat them as prized possessions.

I went down to Florida to see Derik one summer when we were in junior high school. His mom, Brenda, took us to Disney one day and dropped us off to do what we wanted. All that freedom. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We ran from one end of Disney to the other end of Epcot. I don’t even know if we actually did anything — we just sprinted around pointing things out to each other. Too exuberant to focus. I remember we also talked Brenda into taking us to a questionable amusement park nearby — Circus World, I think it was called. We both got whiplash. Then we went to New Smyrna Beach and I got a nasty sunburn for good measure.

We would see each other over the past decades for life’s milestones — graduations, weddings, funerals. And each time we picked up like nothing had ever changed.

I’m looking at that scar on my hand right now and grieving the loss of my friend. The memories grow faint with age. But that little guy, that precocious little raconteur, my best friend Derik — he’s still jumping off the furniture warehouse shelves in my mind. Full of life. Spreading positivity like only he could.