Andy Clary where are you?

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There are so many Andy stories I could tell. Like the time he got a bit drunk at the deli he worked at and tried to serve a customer some frozen – onion rings I believe it was – and then bellowed “you mean you want them cooked too?!?!” when they objected.

Or the time I drove my car straight into a flood and stalled, and Andy came to my rescue. In freezing water up to his knees he insisted I stay inside the car ostensibly to steer, while he pushed the car about 15 feet, uphill, and out of the water. It was so cold he lost a shoe and didn’t know it. When the car was out of the water we ran back home and whipped our jeans off the minute we got in the door, wet socks flying as we went. I headed straight for the thermostat and Andy got the blankets and then we both hunkered down on our own heat grates trapping the warm air in those blankets to get warm while laughing our butts off. No alcohol was involved.

There was the running joke between Andy and his roommate Matt when they moved into a trailer next to ours. Under the sink in the back bathroom they found a pair of women’s panties. Gross, unwashed women’s panties. Being the male college students they were – they took turns pranking each other with them. Matt realized at one point that he had been sleeping with those panties inside his pillowcase for a good week and never knew, and next Andy found those panties spread wide across his light fixture on his bedroom ceiling. They went back and forth a few more times and I don’t think I wanted to know what eventually happened to those nasty underwear.

Andy was a guy, only about 2 years younger than my husband and I, who lived with us for a while – when we lived in Carbondale, IL – home of Southern Illinois University. Somehow we sort of adopted Andy, called him our son and he told his parents he was living in a nice place with a married couple giving them the impression that we were older and a good influence.

Andy was a good, good friend, simply a lovely guy with a wonderful sense of humor and bad pronunciation of words like ‘wash’ – he said ‘warsh’ and insisted he could not hear the difference. He had me convinced for 3 years that he was color blind because I had believed him when he first told me and he didn’t have the heart to tell me differently all that time. He drank too much and swore better than anybody I knew, and would share his last cigarette if you asked him to.

After college ended Andy went off to the Peace Corps. We hadn’t even known he was thinking about it because we left the area before he did. We saw him once, maybe twice after he got back from Tunisia, but after that we lost touch. I have always felt so bad about it – I mean – Andy meant so much to us we named our first child after him. But I don’t know where he ended up.

He was raised in central Illinois and for the life of me I cannot remember the town he was from. In the summers before college he used to work on a local pig farm and beyond that – I don’t know much more than what he shared with us during his college years.

I have done Google searches for Andy Clary, Andrew B Clary, and even Andrew B – because that is what his mother called him. But it’s like he has disappeared. So I am posting this not thinking that anyone who reads my blog might actually know Andy. But maybe if somebody else does a Google search, or if Andy ever Googles himself, maybe somehow a connection will be made.

So I really need to ask, where in the world is Andy Clary? Does anybody know?

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