Fifty-five years ago four of us made a promise on a bench by a lake — I drove out there on the day and found three boxes on it.
Fifty-five years ago four of us made a promise on a bench by a lake — I drove out there on the day and found three boxes on it.
My name is Art Sorensen and I am seventy-two.
In 1970 there were four of us. Me, Sal Petrosino, Del Rooney and Gus Halloran, and we spent every afternoon of two summers at Wicker Lake outside Brandt Hollow.
The kind of friendship you assume at seventeen requires no maintenance at all.
On the night we graduated, in the June of 1971, we sat on the wooden bench we had decided years earlier was ours.
And we made a promise.
Fifty-five years from that night, wherever we were, we would be back on that bench.
And then life did what it does.
Sal's family went to Australia in 1972. Del ended up in Germany for work in 1974 and stayed. Gus married a woman from Porto in 1976 and never came back.
I stayed. I was the only one who never went anywhere.
Letters for a while. Then postcards. Then nothing.
Nobody decided. That is the thing nobody tells you. There is no argument and no falling out. There is just a year in which nobody writes and then there is another one.
But I never forgot it.
And as this June came round I kept telling myself not to be a fool. Fifty-five years is an unreasonable thing to expect three old men on three continents to remember, let alone act on.
I drove out there on the eleventh of June anyway, and my hands were not steady on the wheel.
And I came down the path to that bench, and instead of three men there were three boxes sitting on it.
How they got there.
A man called Lonnie Pruitt.
Sixty-eight. He has worked for the county parks department since 1984 and he has looked after Wicker Lake for most of that.
He had those boxes in his shed.
One since 2007. One since 2016. One since 2023.
And he put them on that bench at about six that morning because the dates on all three said the eleventh of June, 2026.
And here is how three men on three continents, over sixteen years, all arrived at the same idea.
None of them had my address.
The letters stopped in 1979. I moved twice in the eighties. My mother died in 1994 and the family house went.
By the time each of them got to the point of wanting to keep that promise, the only fixed point in the world that any of them could name was a bench.
So each of them, independently, wrote to the county parks department in Brandt Hollow.
Sal in 2007. Del in 2016. Gus in 2023.
And each of them said some version of the same thing: there is a bench at Wicker Lake, and on the eleventh of June, 2026, a man called Art Sorensen might come and sit on it, and would somebody please give him this.
And a small county parks department kept three boxes in a shed for nineteen years because nobody could work out how to throw them away.
Lonnie Pruitt told me in the July that the 2007 one has been moved four times and has been in three different sheds, and that when he took over the site in 2009 the man before him pointed at it and said "that's the bench one, don't touch it."
"The bench one."
Box one. Sal Petrosino. Died in 2009, aged fifty-five.
Forty-one letters.
Every single one I ever wrote him, from 1972 to 1978, in order, in a shoebox with an elastic band that had perished and been replaced with string.
I did not know that man kept a thing in his life. He lost two watches in one summer.
And at the bottom of that box there is a forty-second envelope.
Addressed to me at my mother's house. Stamped. Dated the ninth of March, 1979.
Never posted.
Forty-six years in a shoebox on the other side of the world, with a stamp on it, because Sal Petrosino could not get it into a postbox.
Box two. Del Rooney. Died in 2017, aged sixty-three.
About two hundred photographs.
He had the camera. He always had the camera and we were all sick of it and I am now the only one left who is glad.
There are pictures in there of the four of us in 1969 that I have never seen. There is one of Gus asleep in a boat with his mouth open that I laughed at for about four minutes on a bench on my own at eight in the morning.
And there are eleven photographs of that bench.
Taken in 1983. 1991. 2004. 2012.
He came back four times.
Del Rooney flew from Germany to that lake four times over twenty-nine years and did not tell one person, and stood at the side of the water and photographed an empty bench and went home.
Box three. Gus Halloran. Died in 2024, aged seventy.
One letter. Four pages. Written in the September of 2023.
And it explains the whole of the last forty-seven years.
My father died in the August of 1978.
I wrote to all three of them. One letter each, in the same week.
Nobody came.
Not to the funeral, not after. I got a card from Gus about five weeks later that said the right things and nothing else.
And that is when I stopped writing. Not drift. That.
I have never said that out loud to anybody, including my wife, in forty-seven years.
And Gus Halloran's letter, written the year before he died, says this — and I am giving it to you as he wrote it:
***"We all three of us thought one of the other two would go.***
***Sal thought me and Del. Del thought me and Sal. I thought Sal, because he had the money by then.***
***None of us checked with the others. Not one letter between the three of us. We just each of us assumed it was covered.***
***I have thought about that for forty-six years and I have never once been able to make it into a sentence that wasn't an excuse. So I am not going to try now. We all assumed. Nobody went. That's it. That's the whole of it, Art."***
Forty-six years and he would not dress it up.
And then I opened Sal's unposted envelope, which I had been holding since about half past seven that morning.
Four lines. March of 1979.
***"Art. I should have come in August. I didn't and I can't tell you why in a way that would help.***
***I've started this eleven times.***
***I'm going to post this one.***
***Sal."***
He did not post it.
He kept it for thirty years and then he put it in a box for me and had it sent to a bench.
And the photograph.
This is the one.
In Del's box there is a print from the fourth of May, 1991. It is written on the back in his hand: Wicker, May 91.
It is the bench, from about two hundred yards down the north shore, where the path comes round.
And there is a man sitting on it.
It is me.
The fourth of May, 1991, was my fortieth birthday.
And I drove out there on my own that afternoon and sat on that bench for about an hour and did not tell Marlene where I had been.
And Del Rooney was at the other end of that lake on the same afternoon.
He saw me. He photographed me. And he did not walk round.
Two hundred yards.
And in his box, clipped to that print, there is a strip of paper with eight words on it in biro:
***"Didn't know how to start. Thirty-four years ago."***
He wrote that in 2016, when he packed the box, twenty-five years after the fact and a year before he died.
I have not decided what to do with that photograph and it has been five months.
Some days it is the worst thing I have ever been handed. A man I loved was two hundred yards away on my fortieth birthday and got back on a plane.
And some days I look at it and think: he was there.
They were all there. Sal was there in a shoebox with an elastic band. Del was there four separate times with a camera. Gus was there for four pages in 2023 refusing to lie to me.
None of them made it to the bench and all three of them got to the bench.
What I have done since.
I wrote to the three families in the July. It took me about three weeks to write three letters, which anybody who has read this far will find entirely predictable.
And in the September, Sal's granddaughter came.
Mira Petrosino. Twenty-four. Flew from Adelaide.
We sat on that bench for about two hours and I told her what her grandfather was like at seventeen, which nobody in her family could have told her, because he left at eighteen.
She said the thing I keep: "Nobody in our house knew he'd kept anything."
And then the other thing, which is what I actually spend my time on now.
In the August I asked Lonnie Pruitt what happens to things that get left with a parks department and never collected.
And he took me into that shed.
There are eleven other items.
A wooden box from 1991. A holdall. Two envelopes. A framed thing wrapped in a blanket. A set of keys with a label.
Eleven things left over forty years by people who had no address for somebody and one landmark they could both still name.
A bench. A jetty. A particular tree.
Because that is what people do when they have lost the person but still know the place.
I have found four of them.
Four. In five months, at seventy-two, on a laptop my daughter set up, with a lot of help from a woman at the county records office called Audra Finn who has taken it on as a personal matter.
One of them was a woman in her eighties in Ohio. That is all I am going to say about it, because it is hers.
Seven to go, and I am going to be doing this for some time, and I have not been this useful since 1996.
And the last thing.
I go out to that bench about once a fortnight now.
And I have stopped taking the photograph with me, because I was looking at it too much.
But I do take one thing.
Sal's stamp.
I steamed it off that envelope in the July, very badly, and it is in my wallet behind my card.
A nine-cent stamp from 1979 that never went anywhere.
That man licked a stamp, put it on an envelope with my mother's address on it, and then put it in a drawer, and it travelled twelve thousand miles thirty years later in a shoebox to reach a bench three miles from the house it was addressed to.
It got here.
May you like
It took forty-seven years and it went the long way round and the man who sent it has been dead since 2009.
But it got here, and I am the one who is still alive to open it, and that is the only part of any of this that I am certain about.
