Mar
22
Pieces of David
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I sit behind a large picture window and watch the world change in thin lateral strips, a visual victim of mini-blinds that were oh, so chic 10 years ago. My friend Dave helped me install them while he was here on vacation from Buffalo, NY. It never occurred to me that it might be rude to draft a houseguest into home improvement projects. I guess I figured that any activity in Portland would be better than watching a week’s worth of old videotapes of “Nova” in Buffalo.
After he’d gone home, and for years after his visit, he’d want regular updates on the state of My Tree. His first visit was in Spring, so the ancient dogwood outside the window was in all her whipped-creamy glory while we installed the blinds. His fixation with trees – well, flora and fauna in general – was one of the things I both loved and loathed about my friend. At age 48, you’d think David had never seen the effects of Fall. He seemed constantly surprised by the changing nature of clouds and sunlight. He would call daily with reports about the Monarch butterfly migration, the Perseid meteor showers, or the activities of his two sadly apartment-bound, but otherwise completely unremarkable cats.
On my only trip to his side of the country, we drove around for hours exploring the unrelenting vagueness of rural New York. David was in a perpetual state of near-completion of his doctoral thesis on geography and its affect on socio-economics. He could (and did) talk for hours about the natural history, the cost/benefit ratios of any current or pending economic development programs, and geo-political atmosphere of each new township. After fully annotating Hillary Rodham-Clinton’s last self-serving appearance in whatever little backwater we’d entered, he might hit the occasional lull in his lecture. I’d try to jump in with something pithy and relevant, and the darling would interrupt me to point out the 37th appearance of a red-winged black bird simply because I had mentioned that we don’t see them much on the west coast. It was a little irritating, but you had to admit that the guy was deeply passionate about life. Even if it was only as an objective observer.
We decided to spend the infamous 1999/2000 New Year’s Eve together. With so much drama swirling around the event, I thumbed my nose at caution and did it up right. I booked us at a swanky but uniquely Northwest party in the Columbia River Gorge, hosted by a locally renown brew pub owner. The McMenamin’s Edgefield Resort started life in 1911 as the regional work farm/poor house, then spent some time as a rather dubious orphanage before falling into disrepair sometime after World War II. During the financial boom of late 1990s, all 38 acres’ worth of buildings and farmland were restored to a gracious European-style hotel with an Arts and Crafts décor, extensive gardens, a small golf course, onsite massage therapist, a cozily-appointed movie theatre serving beer and pizza with the show, various shops featuring local new age hippie artisans (live glass blowing, tapestries, pottery), with a little 60s counter-culture whimsy splashed here and there in the fun, slightly acid-trippy hand painted interiors. Being a history buff, dedicated socialist, and a big fan of bands like Fairport Convention and Jefferson Airplane (NOT Starship), I figured Dave would fall in capital-L love with this place.
We checked in and, despite my best efforts to hide it, he happened to see how much I’d paid for the weekend. To David, frugality is the very backbone of existence. The problem is, I like to do more than exist. Upon seeing the bill, he immediately became quiet and fidgety. Yes, we could have fed that old orphanage for 6 months on what I paid for 2 nights’ worth of fun and frivolity. So shoot me. The turn of a new millennium only happens… well, once in a millennium! We head for our room. He is immediately cheesed by the fact that the one little elevator, while thoroughly modern by 1911 standards, doesn’t go all the way to our floor (formerly the staff’s quarters). We’re forced to take the broad and beautifully hand-painted stairway up the last two flights. Our room is huge and a little spare, but cozy in that perfect Craftsman way: Simple but heavy furniture, thick carpets and richly-colored upholstery. David grumbles about the lack of a television and then notices the old plank floors, pointing out that we’re probably making a lot of noise for the people below us. While he resents the stairs and is uber cautious of every move, he’s now apparently glad we’re on the top floor.
Impossible though it may seem, the evening continued downhill from there. Dinner was tense and unusually quiet while he measured everything against its price tag. Twelve dollars for a plate of pasta suddenly seemed a great travesty even though he wasn’t paying for it. David insisted on drinking water even though the bottle of champagne at our table was part of the package. There were five different bands playing around the estate throughout the night but none of them seemed to suit my date: A favorite local funk/blues outfit (too loud), a stellar 18-piece big band (too old), a cool up-and-coming grunge band playing in the estate’s power plant (too young), a beautiful string quartet in the wine bar (too sleepy), and a jazz quartet complete with a torch singer in the scotch/cigar bar (too smoky). I was more than ready to let him sit in the car with the radio on. To make matters worse, I couldn’t get drunk. He wouldn’t have even one cocktail with me, so I’m too busy looking at his half-empty water glass to enjoy my desperate double vodka on the rocks. I continued plastering the cracks in my brave face for the next five hours.
Kindly remember that this one night was fraught with more tension and fear than any night could possibly carry without the help of someone like Freddy Kruger or Rush Limbaugh. Amazingly, nothing crashed. The world didn’t end. With neither a bang nor a whimper, the Year 2000 walked in the door, cracked open a beer and wondered what the hell everyone was staring at. So after throwing a lackluster shrug at the arrival of a new century and having tried so hard to have a good time all night, I was completely worn out. We trudged back up the two flights of stairs and into our room where I quickly washed my face and put on sweats before crawling into bed. The only thing missing from my “NO SEX FOR YOU” message was the mud mask and a rattling aspirin bottle.
I found out later that he’d planned on asking me to marry him that night. That was much later, after the premature evacuation of our intended holiday love nest; after the string of movie theatres allowing me to sit in the dark and not talk to him for most of the first day of the new century; after my praying for his airplane to hurry up so I can go home and change my sheets and enjoy my solitude. It was a little while after he got home and we fell back into the three daily phone calls about his cats, but not long after I told him that I couldn’t take it anymore. That’s when he sent an extended email saying that he understood. He sympathized with my frustration and even admired my long-suffering tolerance of his eccentric ways. That’s when he told me that he’d intended to propose on New Year’s Eve. I felt like a heel. A selfish, shallow, and incredibly grateful heel.
Good thing for me that our nine year friendship, and the genuine love at the core of it, was much bigger than one sour weekend and a botched marriage proposal. We went on to value every wonderful aspect of one another, even the stuff that drove us completely mad. So when he died suddenly in December of 2003, it truly was like losing part of myself. I could look down and see a shark-sized bite taken out of my chest, sometimes forgetting for a moment what had happened. Then the loss and the sadness of his dying all alone would push down on my shoulders and grab my throat. It would throttle me until everything went a little gray. Then I’d cry and peer into the hole in my chest wishing that he’d put me back together.
As weeks passed and what he had of a family sorted through what he had of a life, they found all the little bits of me that David had left behind. Like bread crumbs, they found my name, my birthday, and parts of my phone numbers and address leading the way into his computers, bank accounts, and his sainted Palm Pilot. The Weather Channel was streaming up-to-the-minute Portland temperature and rainfall stats to his desktop in Tonawanda. There was a folder on his Palm specifically to help him remember to tell me about interesting books, good articles in the current New Yorker or The Nation, upcoming poetry events or art exhibits at University of Buffalo, and even funny commercials that he’d seen. David knew I didn’t watch much television, but he was always trying to sell me on how good it can be. I tried to explain that the only thing more tedious than watching television was to hear about it second-hand. He and my dad have similar reading tastes, so he would frequently bundle up books he’d read and ship them off to me. They found two boxes of paperbacks packed up and addressed, apparently waiting for his next trip to the local mail center. I was the beneficiary of his small pension at the University. I was everywhere in his life. Not in the creepy John Hinckley/Jodie Foster way, but in the gentle way of a truly great friendship and enduring love.
So from between the mini-blinds, I watch the first flowers appear on the dogwood tree. In my head, I give Dave the daily update on how they change from buttery yellow to white as they yawn open. I mention how the new leaf buds seem to make the flowers float in a liquid green haze. As always, I think he’s happy to hear about it. I tease him a little for being such a sap, and try not to think about his unremarkable and suddenly orphaned cats licking him goodbye as he lay dying on the floor. Instead, I keep my heart fixed on the tree, the mercurial Portland sky, the fires of autumn. And in return for my daily devotionals, he’s giving me his perspective, his wonder, and his passion for life. Occasionally I look down into the hole in my chest. I see it slowly filling in with all the best pieces of David, and I realize that we’ve both survived.