Last Thursday a close friend and mentor of mine died.
2023 was a brutal year; in one two day period I lost three friends: Betsy, Jane, and Jan. All four of the above were the real living breathing kind of friends I’d known for years who lived within minutes of me.
Recently, there were also Jerry and Albert, and very local to my inner circle at the time, Jean, even though I never really got to know her.
More recently, Blacktop Jim (that’s my designation: I don’t think anybody else called him that).
I was still mourning my Dad’s death in 2022 when all that happened.
But this last one, my friend Tony……
He and I had our shot at being funny guys at the bar, a little window of opportunity that only lasted a couple of years, but we didn’t connect that way. We connected in the way that comes AFTER that, if you’re among the lucky. I am pretty sure that there was a time that Tony could have watched me work while I was handling Elaine’s weekly food order, and since I do not exactly recall any particular instances, if Tony was in there, he was drinking (and I say that with great respect and love). However, if I was wearing that necktie, I was not drinking, so in the end we never “tied one on” together because I did my Master’s Degree drinking in Storm Lake (and later my Ph.D. in Okoboji) and Tony did his in Royal, Linn Grove, Peterson, and originally Emmetsburg.
He got a head start on the quitting thing. Like by almost twenty years. As it turns out, an incredibly valuable twenty years. I picked his brain liberally and greedily. People got us confused sometimes, which we both thought was weird and funny because WE could tell us apart, but the confused people were seeing haircuts and facial hair and nothing else. That’s how we size people up.
Tony and I intersected when I adopted the quitting thing, and we bonded. He helped me with a lot of stuff. We saw each other often. We had a telephone thing. But it got more interesting than that-it turns out our bond was portable. I eventually moved to Storm Lake and it didn’t make any difference. Because he lived between the two county seat towns, he spent as much time in Storm Lake as he did in Royal anyway.
So that worked and then Death Trauma happened in 2018-19 and I moved again to Spencer, my home town of 50 years ago. Didn’t matter-there was Tony. In fact, being a carpenter, he did a lot of stuff at Menards, but it didn’t stop there. At one time, while he was doing some remodeling for his daughter and her husband, he lived across the street. We’d meet out in the driveway and smoke and I’d play with Kona. I miss Kona. I think passers-by and lookie-Lou’s may have seen us standing out there and wondered how the hippies happened to have taken over that part of the neighborhood. We didn’t look very homogenous with our surroundings,
Tony’s Mom wound up in a Spencer nursing home. He was very devoted, and on his frequent trips to town to see Ma, he’d bang on my door and we’d smoke and talk about things.
He was there, doing that, when my Dad died.
There was no point in us talking about lots of things because we agreed on lots of things anyway and we’d both be the choir in those conversations. We did, however, almost always, talk about being sober.
We’d both had plenty of opportunities to NOT be sober-the standard ones: being broke, divorced, badly in need of a shave and a haircut, that stuff, but we talked about stuff that old-timers had taught him before I even got started quitting. God help me to remember those stories.
This past week, we had one hell of a time, mostly unsuccessful. We both felt crummy, I was pretty sure I had to be contagious, and we were getting pretty close to failing a particular Plan B (which did fail), and there was something wrong with my phone for a little while. Whatever I had made it most comfortable if I called from my bed, and I’ll bet dollars to donuts he was sitting in his chair. So, we went over what’s-next, and I knew his kids were going to visit him the next day and that had to be a good thing.
I had been worried. I know I mentioned that to various people. Tony had been missing stuff lately that he didn’t miss. But I knew that his family would make him go to a doctor. I could relax and quit nagging. The only thing was: he thwarted that opportunity by dying before they got there.
I want to tell myself I could have done something sooner, I could have done something more. I could tell in our last conversation, just like in every other last conversation that I’ve ever had, that we were running out of things to say, and there WERE no more things to do.
I’m not the only guy who can talk like this about Tony like this; there are literally hundreds of guys who can say these things. You know those little pamphlets you get at funerals about the deceased? I have it first hand that Tony saved hundreds of those. He showed up.
We try to talk about “loss” when these things happen. I did not lose anything-I cemented over forty years of spiritual experience into the bag that I carry.
And Tony, you did not graduate.
