While I was growing up in Larchmont, N.Y., I had a friend, Neddy Bellamy, living in the house next to mine. He had a little brother, Mikey -- young enough to invite teasing and abusing, as younger siblings are wont to do. And Neddy, if I recall correctly, obliged him royally.

I remember one afternoon, for instance, when Neddy tied the kid with clothes line to a stout tree in his back yard and then took off on foot for parts unknown. He'd tied up his little brother in such a way that Mike couldn't sit down or rest, but had to stand clasping the tree. By the time I came along, Mikey had twisted, turned, and pulled the rope so tightly that it required a sharp knife to disengage the boy from his misery. And, as I distinctly remember from watching the tears run down his tortured, red face, he was in a state of advanced misery.

I ran into the kitchen of the Bellamy house and reported Ned's "joke" to Mrs. Sally Bellamy, and thus inadvertently set in motion a punishment for Neddy that he wouldn't let me forget for a couple of weeks. (And which, if ever I talk with him in the future, I'm sure he hasn't yet forgotten.)

One night a number of years ago, after the whole Bellamy clan had moved from Larchmont to Shaker Heights, Ohio, I remember phoning Mr. Bellamy during Cottey's Christmas break.

After speaking to Mr. B. for a few moments, he asked me if I wanted to speak to Mike.

Well, of course, I replied. I hadn't spoken to Mike in many years. I think, in retrospect, that Mr. Bellamy was especially eager for Mike and me to keep in touch, because we were both training to be college teachers of English. As I recall, the following year I won my Ph.D. and moved to Nevada, Mo., where I started a 30-year teaching career at Cottey College.

When I remembered Mikey Bellamy, I remembered a fairly short kid with a full head of hair. But, last month, when I called up his image on the Internet, he appeared as a balding middle-aged man.

I was, needless to say, shocked, until I remembered his father had balded late in life. If his name hadn't appeared with his photograph in the faculty section of Saint Thomas College in St. Paul, Minn., I wouldn't have recognized him.

Could so many years have passed, and so drastically marred the boy who was so many years younger than I?

And if Time had gouged out so many changes in Mike, what had it done to his older brother Ned, who was almost exactly my contemporary? I shivered to think.

Today, Wednesday, Aug. 3, I received a letter from said Mike Bellamy, responding to my letter of earlier this year.

As is usual with long letters filled with reminiscences, he started out mentioning the subjects I had written about in my letter to him.

I thought I recalled writing a favorable Sunday column about our musical neighbor J. Fred Coots, who had written many hit songs, including "You Go To My Head,." "Love Letters in the Sand," and the inimitable "Santa Claus in Coming to Town," about which my mother, around Christmas time, used to say, "Gosh, I can hear those nickels and dimes clattering into the Coots treasury right now."

All of Coots' songs were not the "this season only" brand that rules the air-waves now, but what musicians call "standards."

Sure, he wrote a fair number of turkeys, but what impresses me all these many years later is the larger number of solid melodies.

I would not have dared write a full column about J. Fred Coots because I didn't know him very well.

Neither did I, for instance, know his children Clayton and Gloria, and his wife the former Ziegfeld beauty Mrs. Coots (I never did catch her first name). I guess I must have figured his character from the warmth of his lyrics. But I might have been wrong.

Mike Bellamy recalled, in his letter to me, "I very much enjoyed the newspaper stuff you wrote some time ago about Normandy Lane, including my own 15 minutes of fame for being tied up and forgotten until Ned was reminded of my existence by my mother. Also, I think about you every time I hear 'Santa Claus is Coming to Town' and how nasty loony Coots was to the real life kids who had the temerity to come across his path -- which he identified with crossing him. Didn't he go after you or Bev with a cane? I remember delivering his paper to him and getting into quite a confrontation. I guess I was one of those naughty ones who got no tips at Christmas."

"Nasty loony Coots"? Well, now that he mentions it, there was a sort of confrontation between the two of us that occurred when he and his neighbor Phillip Daitsch were observing me and my younger sister Beverly playing outside our house one afternoon.

I was riding my two-wheeler around Normandy Lane, while Bev was standing still, trying to throw a clothesline around me each time I passed by her. The first couple of times, I sailed right by, but on the third try, Bev got her range, and threw the rope into my eyes. Not being able to see her, I drove right over her two feet, causing her to fall on her backside, hitting the back of her head against the cast- iron grillwork of the sewer.

By that time, Mr. Coots and Mr. Daitsch, who had both seen the whole dispiriting episode, had rushed outside, and Mr. Daitsch took his umbrella and hit me hard in the behind with it.

By this time, my father had emerged from the house and picked up my sister Bev, who had been knocked out by the blow against the wrought-iron grill work, carried her tenderly into our house, and put her in bed in one of the twin beds in our parents' second-story master bedroom.

They called our family doctor, Dr. Fairfax Hall, who drove to the scene of the accident and, after surveying Bev's injury, said she'd be all-right after a rest. Which, indeed, she was.

What's of real interest to me now is how differently from one another we all remember those events that, and people who, played a part in the world that surrounds and makes us who we are now.

When I was about 15 years old, my father descended into a period of deep depression from which he never quite recovered. Those were in the days before the chemical miracle known as Zoloft and its numerous brethren were developed, and in the days when medical doctors were inclined to advise their patients to visit a psychiatrist, instead. I remembered my young father, in the 1950's, enjoying his legal work at American Oil Company (AMOCO), and hosting parties for them and others at our home in Larchmont Woods. I remember coming home from camp one summer, and his taking me to New York City to buy a .22 rifle at Abercrombie and Fitch, on Fifth Avenue, where, he told me, Ernest Hemingway bought his big-game equipment for his trips to Africa.

He valued my help when he undertook to replace the concrete walkway in which were embedded the many flagstones of different colors.

As time went on, his condition grew worse, and it had an apparently irreversible effect not only on my mother, who had, I heard, once been a sprightly, vivacious and pretty young woman.

In Mike Bellamy's letter, I read, only yesterday, "I also remember your mother in particular. One of the funniest human beings I have ever encountered. One day I recall just about falling on the floor laughing listening to her for something like an hour."

But that was a rare quirk. My mother, I now fear, was at heart somewhat afraid of the depression-ridden young man she had married, and didn't often exercise her sense of humor.

I know that now, but I didn't know it when I was younger, when it would have done my mother some good.