Childhood pals reunite after chance event
West Roxbury natives have 60 years to catch up on
You might call it serendipity, though Nancy, who can’t stop telling the story to everyone she meets, prefers to think of it as “a God wink.”
It was something special, that’s for sure, a story that seems like it ought to be shared, especially in light of all the ghastly news assailing us every day.
She was dining with a friend when she happened to mention she lived on Manthorne Road in West Roxbury until her family moved to Canton in 1954, when she was 11.
“I once owned a house on Garnet Road,” the friend said. “And my backyard abutted a yard on Manthorne Road, owned by a guy named Jim Meunier, who was so nice to us.”
“Jimmy Meunier! He was my uncle.”
Soon the former Nancy DeWitt was reeling off names of long-ago neighbors, each of whom evoked a precious memory.
“Did you know a family named Holder?” her friend asked.
“Mary Agnes Holder!” she gasped. “She was my very best friend. How did you know her?”
“Well, she married my cousin 52 years ago. In fact, I’m going to visit them tomorrow up at Lake Winnisquam, right before they head back home to Florida. Would you like to come along and surprise her?”
And that’s how two 74-yearold ladies happened to find themselves face to face for the first time in 63 years, or since they walked together as sixthgraders at the Lyndon School.
And, oh, what a glorious reunion they had.
The beautiful thing about old friends is that, after the hugging and weeping are dealt with, the laughs and remembrances take over as if those 63 years were little more than a brief interlude.
“Remember how your father used to paint our faces at Halloween?” Mary said. “We’d be lined up in your hallway waiting for him to come home from work.”
Mary also recalled hopscotch games on the sidewalk, and Nancy remembered “bouncing balls off the sides of our houses, where there wasn’t much space, and hearing your mother blow that special whistle of hers, the one that had four tones, a different one for whichever one of you she was calling home.”
And then they talked about their friend Billy, whose family was the first on the street to own a TV.
“We’d all be in his living room,” Mary remembered, “lying on our stomachs, watching Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bob and Phineas T. Bluster, and Clarabell, and Flub-a-Dub, and Cornelius T. Cobb.”
Then the VFW Parkway was constructed in what had been a gorgeous pasture, giving rise to a small strip mall originally known as Hancock Village.
“Remember going over there to the movie theater, seeing ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’ with Jimmy Stewart and Betty Hutton?” Nancy asked.
“That’s right!” Mary replied. “And don’t forget the lime rickeys and vanilla Cokes we drank at Liggett-Rexall’s.”
“And Bert Parks! Remember watching him crown Miss America every year?” Nancy reminisced. “It was never the same after they let him go.”
So it went, hour after hour, as the 11-year-old girls inside those 74-year-old ladies rejoiced at finding one another again.
“What are the odds on that?” Nancy asked rhetorically. “Just a few days later and Mary would have been back in Florida for another year and none of this would have happened.”
But it did happen. And the perfect background melody would have been Eddie Fisher’s “Turn back the hands of time; let’s live it over again.”
In a way that’s exactly what these gals plan to do.
“I cannot tell you how happy seeing you again has made me,” Mary emailed from Florida, inviting Nancy to come down for a visit. “See you soon, I hope, my first true friend.” Serendipitous? Absolutely. Or might it have been a God wink? That’s a possibility, too.