I recently bought one of my favorite movies, “Animal House,” and finally got around to watching it..

It holds up more than 30 years after its release.  Belushi was every bit as funny as he was the first time I saw it, Tim Matheson was still oily but likable, Karen Allen was still adorable.

How much did I like “Animal House?”  I saw it five times when it was in theaters in 1978.  But I really only remember one of those times, because it was the sole good part of one of the saddest days of my life.

My friend Ted was with the Marines in Washington, D.C., where his job was to do ceremonial funerals at Arlington National Cemetery.  Late in August, he and some fellow Marines went out for the evening and, as was their habit, they jumped an electric train and held onto it for a free ride.  While the train was going through a tunnel, Ted climbed up on top; his head hit the electrical wire and he was killed instantly by a massive shock.  He was dead before his body hit the ground, burned so badly that they couldn’t have an open-casket funeral.

I was a pallbearer, along with the rest of the guys in our group from high school.  For the burial at Fort Snelling, they got a bunch of Marine reservists and it was, to put it gently, a comedy of errors.  When the honor guard folded the flag to give to Ted’s mom, the commander called about-face, one guy about-faced the wrong way and walked into the guy next to him.  The bugler was flat when he played “Taps.”  The first two four-rifle salutes went off crisply, but the third sounded like a popcorn popper.  And this at the burial of a guy whose job was to do all those things at state funerals.  One friend’s mom said she could just see Ted standing in the back of the crowd, holding his head in his hands and shaking it in the way he did to pantomime comic distress.

That was in the morning.  We were down at the burial – it was the first time I actually cried, when the minister said something that particularly got to me – then up at the gathering afterwards, then down at the memorial service, then up at the party afterwards.  By the end of the day, everybody’s emotions were scraped raw.  We pallbearers decided to get stoned and go see “Animal House.”  It was the only part of the whole day Ted would actually have approved of.

I went to my first funeral in fifth grade, when a girl in my class died of leukemia.  I remember being shocked that people actually were crying, because the only other funerals I’d seen were stiff-upper-lip Kennedy burials.  In ensuing years, I buried uncles and aunts and grandparents.  But Ted was the first person I lost who was really close to me.  It was, up to that time and maybe since, probably the worst tragedy of my life because it was the least expected.

For many years, a week didn’t go by that he didn’t cross my mind.  I think of him less now, maybe a few times a year, or when something comes along that reminds me of him, like a viewing of “Animal House.”  I was angered and confused at his death when I was 19, but half a lifetime has since softened it into the embodiment of the great mystery of twisted fate.

Ted’s pallbearers haven’t been together in years, but I suspect – hell, I know – that his final gift to us all was a bond that will never break.  On the day of the burial, one of the other guys said, “Just think:  No matter how old we get, Ted will always be 18.”  The sentiment may seem banal, but it was profound at the time and has become even more so with passing years.

Even though I’ve only kept in touch with one of the guys (my best friend starting in junior high), I know we’re all pretty much in the same place.  We’re middle-aged men who have made our peace with life.  We’ve raised or are still raising children, we have survived the small indignities and tiny triumphs life provides.  We have muddled through, more or less, and if we’re lucky we realize the immense nobility in that.

But there is, for each of us, a tiny piece of boyhood buried under a small white stone at Fort Snelling National Cemetery.  It’s a reminder of a time when life stopped making sense, but also of boys who greeted the future with boundless ignorance and great hope.

Ted – who had little patience for this kind of navel-gazing – would never have thought that he would do that for us, even had he somehow known he was a short-timer.  If he read this, he would look at me with something like pity and burst out laughing.  And I would have laughed with him.  Maybe he’s laughing now.

That’s okay, though.  When we were boys, as he still is, laughter always came easily.  And it was laughter not tempered by the knowledge that it would be the lesser portion of life.

I should go get a seven-ounce bottle of Pabst, which is what we drank on those long evenings at Ted’s house, and make that my remembrance.  But then, I don’t need to touch a beer bottle or stand before a headstone to know what he was and is to me. 

When responsibility weighs heavy, and when the joints creak, the memories of those nights and of Ted are enough.