Joe was my best buddy in my preteen and teen years. We put a lot of miles on each other, or something like that. Joe was the only boy in a family of four girls. He lived about a mile from our house on Meece Mill road.

I remember walking home from Twelve Mile Elementary School with Joe on many occasions. One April afternoon, we were strolling along headed home from school and — for no reason apparent to me, at least — Joe hauled off and threw all his books in the Twelve Mile River. I asked why he did that, and his reply was that he was tired of studying them, and besides, they were heavy. When I told him that he would have to pay for them, he jumped into the river and retrieved the now-waterlogged books.

The next day, the books were dry and about three times as thick as the day before. When asked what happened, he shrugged and said something about the oven being too hot.

When we were 16 or 17, Joe and I once joined a proposed lake

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