The Kirk Connection – Continued

In my “MacKellar 1.0” blog back on April 29, I told a story about the time my friend Kirk MacKellar and I realized that we share this kindred connection to the old Huntley Square neighborhood where I grew up.

It turns out that Kirk and I spent a good chunk of our formative years growing up on the same parcel of old farm land. In fact, our respective childhood homes are only a stone’s throw away from one another, which meant that the hallowed grounds that had served as the backdrop for so many of my most cherished childhood memories  consisted of the same rolling hills, adjacent fields, cricks and ponds that Kirk had discovered  and explored decades earlier. 

The only problem, if you want to call it that, is that one of us apparently had their childhood nostalgia bulldozed to make room for the other one’s memories and experiences of growing up in the same place.

If you didn’t have a chance to read the “MacKellar 1.0” blog, let me provide a quick recap…

After establishing that we had both attended the same elementary school in Holt, Kirk had asked me exactly where it was that I had grown up. I explained that my mom and dad lived in the old Huntley Square neighborhood, behind the old football field. That they were something like the second house ever built in that entire subdivision, to which Kirk had nonchalantly responded that he actually lived in the first house in that subdivision. 

Confused, I had asked him, “what do you mean?”, which is when he explained that he and his family had lived in the old farm house on Aurelius Road that was part of the property that was sold off to Francis Fine, the guy who developed Huntley Square. 

Kirk said that he distinctly remembered the day, when he was 16 years old, and this guy showed up with a bulldozer, knocked down all of the old barns and outbuildings, poured a five-gallon container of gas on the pile of debris and lit it all on fire. 

Then in typical Kirk fashion, he sent me a photo of the old farm house with the following caption:

“This is the farm I grew up on. It was bulldozed so you could grow up there as well”

I asked Kirk if he would be willing to take a picture of the current day farm house so that I could post “then” and “now” photos – and of course he was happy to oblige.

Side-by-side photos of the farm house then, and now.

He said that the current day farm house and its surroundings hardly resemble the place where he remembered growing up, which isn’t that surprising, since I feel the same way about the old Huntley Square neighborhood I used to call home, which has really started to show signs of its age, especially in the last thirty years or so.

But even then, the old farm house is part of our shared past, this symbol of days gone by that will forever connect the two of us, two happy, memorable  childhoods bookending some random span of years in the late sixties, that fateful day when the bulldozer showed up behind the old farm house.

And as strange as it is to use bulldozers as the basis of your friendship, I guess I’ll finish up by saying that the stranger thing would be to ignore all of the other coincidences that an unconventional friendship like ours continues to produce.

Another one of these random Kirk connections happened less than a week after I had published my “MacKellar 1.0” blog.

On this particular Saturday, my wife Teresa and I were hanging out in Dimondale with our friends, Scott and Erin House. We didn’t have any specific plans, other than we were going to go to Dime’s to sit and enjoy a beer and fill up our growlers, before heading back to their place on the river, and maybe go for a ride on their mud boat to visit some of their friends who lived down stream a little ways.

After Scott tried unsuccessfully to jump the battery in their mud boat, we moved the whole operation over onto their pontoon and set sail down river toward their friends Bobby and April’s place.

When we arrived at Bobby and April’s, we tied the pontoon up to their dock, and then walked up their long, inclined yard to a small patio where they had a little fire going. We stood around the fire shooting the shit and drinking beer.

Us guys focused a lot of our conversation on construction-related topics, since Bobby and April had bought their place the year before, and were still going through and making a bunch of renovations. At one point I asked Bobby about this random slab of concrete off to the side of their driveway.

He kind of shrugged and said that he didn’t know why it was there, but he thought it might be a good place to park an Airstream.

When he said Airstream my ears perked up, as I knew my friend Kirk is big into the whole Airstream scene. Without warning I just asked, “Do you know a guy named Kirk MacKellar?”

Bobby gave me this weird look, and in a surprised tone said, “yes, I know Kirk MacKellar really well, why do you ask?”

So, then I went ahead and explained how his “Airstream” key word had made me think of Kirk, and I told him how I just got done writing a series of blog posts about Kirk and his son Josh who I went to high school with, and how my wife and I also know Kirk’s daughter Kelly and her husband Mark and their kids.

For the next few minutes it was a lot of “no shit” and “what a small world” and then things got really interesting.

Right about then, one of the girls who was standing over by the fire motioned to Bobby to turn around, as there was a Sheriff SUV making its way down their private drive to their residence.

Awkwardly, Bobby said, “Well, I guess I’m going to go see what this is all about” apparently worried that maybe one of their neighbors had complained that we were making too much noise.

As Bobby approached the SUV, the officer got out and the two of them greeted one another, shaking hands and slapping each other on the shoulders, so it became obvious to the rest of us that the two of them must know each other.

When the pair finally started making their way over to where the rest of us were standing, emerging from out behind the blinding lights of the SUV’s headlights, we realized it was Kirk’s son-in-law Mark, who we had literally just been talking about five minutes earlier.

None of us could believe it, I mean, what are the chances, or at least that is what I was thinking.

When I emailed Kirk a few days later to ask whether Mark had filled him in about us running into him that night on the river, Kirk said that he had caught up with Bobby, and that he had told him the entire story.

Then in a way that only Kirk can do, he summed things up perfectly--my randomly meeting Bobby that night, our chance run-in with Mark, my friendship with Kirk, everything.

“A friend once told me,” Kirk wrote…

“If you aren't seeing a bunch of coincidences in your life, you aren't paying attention.”