“Funny, you’re a stranger who’s come here
Come from another town
Funny, I’m a stranger myself here
Small world, isn’t it?” — Johnny Mathis

I customarily spend my Wednesday afternoons at the Then & Now Historical Library in beautiful downtown Dorr, but something startling caught my eye in the 75 years ago local gossip section. Mr. and Mrs. Morris Tolhurst of Wayland welcomed as guests Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Shields of Byron Center.

All the memories came flooding back to the mid-1950s..

When I was about 6 years old and my mother bought a house in Croton on the banks of the Muskegon River, our next-door neighbors were Larry and Ruth Shields, who were weekend dwellers, coming from their weekday Byron Center home.

I struck up a friendship with the couple and they even welcomed me into their home briefly in Byron Center, where Ruth worked at the post office. When my family and I began to do a lot of traveling because of Wayne Goodwin’s nomadic work as an electrical lineman, we slowly drifted apart. However, when we left, they took over the care of our dog, Foxy, and I learned much later from their letter that the canine died of old age in 1968.

I briefly saw and chatted with them while walking past their cottage when I was a sophomore at Wayland High School, visiting on a Saturday. I made a point to stop in and see them in 1983 when my step grandmother, Marguerite Goodwin, died.

But it was particularly interesting that I visited with them one last time, in Wayland, at the Sandy Creek Nursing Center. It was 1988, and I brought along my wife and two children.

We chatted somewhat awkwardly for about a half hour. Larry was 92 years old and incredibly mentally and physically alert. Ruth, I was told, had suffered a stroke recently and had difficulty speaking and remembering just who I was.

I asked Larry if he liked living at Sandy Creek. His immediate reply was, “You have to. It’s all you have.” He was that mentally alert and witty at age 92.

I could hear him try to explain to his ailing wife who I was as I and my family left.

Ruth and Larry Shields did not have any children, and my mother often suggested that I was their surrogate grandchild. But it was a relationship that was mutually beneficial.

“It’s a small world after all. It’s a small world after all. It’s a small world after all. It’s a small, small world.” — A Disney movie in the 1990s.

“Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.” — Simon & Garfunkel, 1968, “Old Friends.”