Happy Birthday, Pat Noel

An old friend of mine turns 40 today. I met Pat Noel in 1979, which means I have know him during every decade that we’ve both been alive and that’s pretty important to me. Why?
Well, because for most people it’s their family who loves them through thick and thin, during all the unpleasant and embarrassing stages of their life and gives them the continuity that I think all of us need.

For me, the people who do that are not the people I’m related to. Those people mostly left. And the one who stayed likes to pretend there is no past which is fine because our past was hard. I’m not going to force anyone to relive it. But sometimes I think he forgets that there were some good parts. Some funny parts. Some parts that I love to remember. And for that I have Nancy and Anne, Bridget and Sylvia, and today’s birthday boy, Pat Noel.

Pat Noel came to my elementary school when I was in fourth grade. He started the year in my brother Kevin’s third grade class but after about two weeks his mom came in and told the principal that Pat needed more of a challenge so he skipped third grade and moved right up to fourth. When he entered our class everyone knew that last week he was in third grade and since he immediately kicked everyone’s asses in math, we assumed he must be some kind of genius. We were right.

He was also the best athlete anyone had ever seen. My dad constantly wanted to race him. My brother once made me call Pat in as a ringer for a soccer tournament that Kevin’s team was losing. Pat showed up and they won. It was sort of like the movie “Victory” only without Sylvester Stallone or the Nazis. In seventh grade Pat skipped playing on the 7th and 8th grade soccer team or the junior varsity team and went right to playing with juniors and seniors in high school and travelling to Norway with them for the summer. He was our hero.

But the thing about Pat that was most impressive was his superior social skills. Although a brain, he was never a nerd. Although a jock, he was never a snob. Pat took every cliché the media fed us about stereotypes and threw it out. Forget how brilliant, how athletically gifted he was – first and foremost Pat Noel was a friend. And he was a friend to everyone.

I’ve never met a person who at 40 years of age has never lost a single friend. And I don’t mean never lost a friend to a falling out, although Pat has never had one of those. I mean he’s never just lost touch with someone. He’s never considered someone “fringe” and sort of let them fall away. He has made more friends than anyone else and he has kept them all.

If you could look at a lineup of Pat’s friends you’d see the age range is mind boggling. Pat has friends who I still feel the need to call “Mr.” because they were the Dads of people I grew up with and he has friends so young that there is actually one guy who I believe still is underage…for drinking AND possibly voting.

My memories of Pat are filled with so many crazy hijinks that it would be impossible – and in some cases maybe even illegal – to list them all.

I will tell you that if you see Pat wearing a painter’s cap that says “I survived The Grizzly”, it’s a lie. At the top of the “biggest” hill of the little kid’s Scooby Doo roller coaster he yelled “We’re all going to die!” and that was the end of his thrill ride career.

I will also tell you that if you don’t know how to play the drinking game quarters and Pat offers to teach you as long as you have “two dimes and a nickel”, you better run the other way, or be prepared to end up face down in the bushes mumbling something about how your brother is “TKE at Frostburg”.

And I'll tell you that while Pat is married to a beautiful woman who he adores, his love for his guy friends borders on homosexual. Apparently they even have some sort of pact in place where they will all retire within 10 miles of one another and live out the sunset of their lives together. My friend Fissy is already working on developing a large plot of land on the Eastern Shore for this happening retirement community. Must be over 60, love soccer and be a friend of Pat Noel. I hear there is already a waiting list forming.

Patrick Noel has given me some of my best days. And he’s been there on my worst. I knew him in 1979 when he was the new kid who skipped third grade, goofed off in class and still seemed to be smarter than everyone else. I knew him in 1982 when he decided to be preppy and called himself Puffy (way before Sean Combs did). Because of him I met my most hilarious friend, Fissy, and my friend Nancy met her sexy dancer husband, Bill. I can’t even begin to imagine how much more fun the world would be if there were more Pat Noels in it. All I know is that it’s been a better place for everyone he’s touched the last 40 years.

At the end of one of my favorite movies, Stand By Me, the film’s protagonist, Gordie Lachance, now an adult and a writer, reads aloud as he types the line “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” I’ve always felt like that sort of nailed the way I feel about my childhood friends. And I’ve always known how lucky that makes me.

Happy Birthday, Old Pal.