(Contributed by Beverly Rivera)

After we lived in two rent houses on Boyce street, my parents bought a house on Boyce and Boyles. I guess I was about eight or nine. Across the street from us lived an old man named Mr. Herman. He had a lot on the side of his house that he used to grow a garden. Every summer he would have it filled with rows of tall corn, tomatoes, green beans and sometimes if we were lucky he would grow melons.

When I say lucky, we were - the whole street was lucky because he would bring everybody paper bags filled with his vegetables. Of course at the time vegetables were the least of our favorite foods, but now that I think of it I would die for some of that fresh corn on the cob.

Mr. Herman was my friend. I would go across the street and sit with him on his front porch and he would feed me and his six cats ice cream. He would tell me stories about his family and his wife who had passed away. Sometimes he would let me help him plant things in his garden and let me pick the vegetables that were ripe.

Mr. Herman passed away one night, just went to sleep and never woke up. I remember his son coming over to our house to tell my father. I was sad, he was a nice man and I missed his stories and his ice cream.

* * *

Mr. Herman's house stayed vacant for a long time. We started playing baseball on the empty lot that used to grow his garden. Every afternoon we'd all meet on the lot, even some kids from three blocks away would come to play with us. If we didn't play ball we would just sit on the lot and tell stories.

Sometimes when it would start to get dark we would catch fireflies. We would put them in jars with holes in the lid. We thought if we filled the jar up real good it would be enough light to see with. I guess we were just goofy kids.

One day I came home from school and there was a family moving into Mr. Herman's house. This did not look good because one of them was a girl! I hated her from the start. She had boots on, the long kind that came up to your knees. (I wanted those boots!) She had long curly hair, and I think she thought she was cute! I made up my mind then and there that I wasn't going to like her. Her name was Sandy (ukh!). Even her name was cute!

One day she was standing out on the porch, and I asked her, "Where you get them boots?"

She told me that her mother worked at Joske's in GulfGate Mall, - you remember Gulfgate Mall, one of the first malls in Houston. We started talking and I guessed she was allright.

After that day we would go back and forth to each other's house to hang out or listen to records. We were inseparable and this started one of the longest lasting friendships I've ever had. For the last thirty something years we have kept up with each other. She lives in California now and we still talk to each other through letters, e-mails and instant messenger.

Good old Mr. Herman had sent me a new best friend, to live in his house.