CityView Magazine

8 | April 2020 O M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S Making lemonade from lemons BY BILL MCFADYEN O ne of the benefits for me in exercising my responsibilities of fatherhood was the adoption of other people's kids. ose adoptions started with Maggie's toddler friend Emma McCauley at First School. Today, I still consider Emma, at age 21, as mine. With our two boys, I began adopting their friends on father/son hunting and fishing trips. e pace accelerated during Little League baseball and Church League basketball, continuing even today with Hudson's Cape Fear High lacrosse team. ree of my adopted sons came from Jamie's dedication to the band at Mac Williams Middle School. By the time he became a high school freshman, Jamie was less oen mine all mine than he was hanging with Drew Smith, John Robert MacNaught and Harry Hill. eir friendship began in the band room, but morphed into having its own life outside of school. ey were oen together on weekends, playing Risk or whiffle ball or having air-so wars. ey were diverse in many ways – athletic abilities, skin color, what they found funny, where dating ranked in importance. Harry Hill was immediately noticeable among these four. He did not look much like the other three, his pigmentation being of a darker hue. Harry was always my "go-to" guy when I was engaging the boys in conversation. I would speak to Harry in a tone that attempted to sell absurdities as if they were factual. ings like, "Harry, the head cheerleader was watching you like a hawk when you marched off the field aer the halime show." Two things worked against Harry in these situations: 1) he was unfailingly sweet and so could not muster telling me that I was lying; 2) Harry is more than a little gullible, especially about things he wanted to believe were true. In the possibility of a cheerleader finding him irresistible, Harry definitely wanted that to be true. e one genetic and three adopted sons went their separate ways aer the summer of graduation, attending four different colleges. (All on pace to graduate in the spring of 2021!) In the summer aer their freshman year, they met at our house one random Saturday to shoot a little basketball in the driveway, play a video contest of some sort, eat whatever food Susie would invariably supply, and basically perpetuate what they began so many years before. Late that aernoon, the gathering broke up because Harry had to return his mother's car to her. It could be argued that Harry's desire for bottled water led to the mild catastrophe that soon followed. He and his water got in Mama Wanda's car, Susie and I waved goodbye to good ole Harry, and off he Harry Hill and Mickey Kimbel

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