The Five Guys From Henry 

A childhood and life-long friend, Glen, just paid me a surprise visit.

He was in town to spend time with a dude he’s been seeing and dropped by my apartment kind of spontaneously.

I’ve known Glen for some 45 years.

I made coffee and we chatted for two hours, mostly about relationship difficulties — our own and those of our family members.

It was a much-needed and fortifying reconnection. There are no friends like old friends, especially now in this horribly isolating pandemic.

Glen and I, along with buddies Dave and Tim, are part of a rare gang of chums who’ve remained in close contact since the beginnings of grade school.

That was a long time ago.

We take turns hosting annual reunion weekends and try to get together a few more times each year, when schedules allow. Glen lives north of Montreal, I’m in Gatineau, Dave and Tim in the Toronto sprawl.

The longevity and the frequent contact means we’ve had front row seats from which to view each other’s lives as they’ve unfolded. As such, our interactions are steeped in tradition, custom, inside jokes, legend and lore, and decades-long friendly disagreements.

We have our own special handshake and sounds effects to use when greeting one another as well as literally dozens of cryptic expressions the meanings of which only we can decode.

We first came together in junior high but more deeply galvanized a group identity when attending George S. Henry Secondary School in suburban Toronto.

Initially our friend Mike was included (more or less as designated clown) so as a quintet we dubbed ourselves Five Guys From Henry. The handy acronym “FGFH” soon appeared and has remained ever since.

When Mike was ostracized for excessively erratic behaviour, we rebranded as the Four Guys From Henry and the acronym still worked.

Like most groups of boys we were ruthlessly hard on one another. Each of us was teased incessantly for what made us distinct: me because I was idle and hearing impaired; Glen because he was clumsy and blame resistant; Tim because he was grumpy and had a lazy eye; Dave because he was bookish and conservative.

Consequently, for nicknames, Tim was “Eye,” I was “Ear,” Dave was “Nose” (it was quite pointy), and Glen was “Fingers” (they were really fat, like sausages).

In high school art class, a few of us learned silk-screen printing so we fashioned an FGFH heraldic shield for ourselves, complete with our own quasi-Latin motto, “Gud Opin Cum Beta.” (A proper explanation of the motto would reach well beyond the scope of this present recounting.)

We printed the shield and motto onto t-shirts, one of which survives and is ceremoniously passed for safe keeping to the host-in-waiting of the next reunion.

( Here I’m tending goal in a game of “Chursk” while Glen fetches the ball from beneath my father’s big blue Pontiac that served as backstop. In Chursk, the shooter stood but the goalie had to play from his knees. My mom came out onto the lawn to snap the picture. The almost blissed-out smile on my face — a rarity in childhood photos of me — speaks to how contented I was in these moments. )

( Glen and I played youth soccer with the North York Spartans. One day we volunteered to take turns wearing the Toronto Blizzard mascot costume during a fundraising event at a mall. Wearing the thing was like stepping into a furnace that stunk with the sweat of a thousand men. Good thing we conscripted Tim to join us; that’s him in the photo looking frosty. )

( We spent many a summer day cavorting in my backyard pool. Here, Dave (with feet up) demonstrates the flexibility he developed as a hockey goalie, while Tim exhibits the rearguard positioning he mastered as a defenseman. Because the concrete pool bottom was slightly gritty, we often rubbed the pads of our toes raw. )

I currently hold the t-shirt but, alas, the pandemic cancelled our annual summer weekend for the first time in the 20-some years since we began them.

There’s always next year.

Some of our many endeavours included the inventing of strange hybrid sports that we’d play with incredible competitive intensity at one another’s houses. These included:

Ping Pong in the Round, in which we ran circles around the table in Mike’s basement striving to keep the rally alive. If your error ended the rally, you were eliminated and the last man standing was the victor.

Half-ball Flipper Baseball, played in Tim’s backyard pool using the remnants of a tennis ball that his dog had chewed in half and a snorkeling flipper that served as bat.

Two-man Boat, usually played in my backyard pool, pitting one pair of us against the other in an all-out aquatic war for control of an inflatable raft.

Chursk, a form of soccer in miniature played on my front lawn with a street hockey net, named after Tony Chursky, the then-goalkeeper for the Toronto Blizzard professional team. *

For a while in high school, Tim, Glen, and I formed a basement band called Myth that was partly modelled after Rush, the Toronto-born rock trio that we idolized. We pretty much sucked (me particularly) and pulled the plug fairly quickly but in recent years we are striving to get the old band back together, this time spearheaded by Dave.

Glen and I have been noodling around as singer-songwriters for many years and Dave more recently followed suit, investing in some beautiful vintage instruments and quite a bit of dad band equipment set up in his cottage basement.

Grumpy Tim was eventually persuaded to dust off his drum sticks. Now that he’s almost an empty-nester he’s getting more into it.

We’re still not nearly skilled enough to cover any Rush material but have managed a few passable renditions of originals and cover songs. More sessions are planned for when the pandemic allows.

As it was back in the day, the FGFH continues as a powerful incubator for our creativity.

In addition to invented games, in high school we chronicled our shenanigans in meticulously detailed comics, poems and mock song lyrics, and comedy skits recorded on cassette tape. For art class we attempted to make a film with a hand-held Super-8 camera and failed miserably.

But all failures were soon brushed aside. We created constantly, held each other’s feet to the fire, and were shaped by it.

Because we’ve had this rare friendship circle in our lives for so many years, sometimes we may not recognize how special and valuable the thing is.

That wasn’t the case the other day during Glen’s visit.

People are often amazed when they sit with us as we rehash some of our myriad stories. Long before the advent of social media, the FGFH was a band of brothers that evolved with the times.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the relative degree of emotional reserve we preferred as boys. These days we hug when greeting one another but we’re still not particularly sentimental about stuff. We don’t, for instance, say that we love one another.

But we do.