Remembering

I had occasion recently to remember something about someone famous I met when I was seventeen who is gone now and that led me into thinking about the people I have known who I was more or less close to who are no longer with us, as well as the well-known ones. I'm a sucker for that part of the Oscars where they memorialize the people who have passed in the last year. I'm enough of a film buff to feel that at least some of them have been in a way part of my life. But back to those who have actually been.

First the story about the person I met at seventeen. I was working at the Boston YMCA and had been involved, despite my relative youth, in resurrecting a chapter of a young men's organization called Phalanx. I was the program Vice President. The President was a man only a few years older who was a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. Len got the opportunity to meet with and interview Malcolm X and he invited me to come with him. So one afternoon I spent three hours in a small conference room at the Y with Malcolm X and two of his associates while Len did the interview. It was during the time that Malcolm X was still with The Nation of Islam. Those three hours were quite the education. His assassination some four years later troubled me as much as some of the others of that decade that saw so many.

On the personal side, the first death of someone not a relative that I had known personally was Charlie M. I had met him when I was hanging around a coffee house in Boston's Back Bay writing and reading poetry for a free coffee. Charlie and Vinnie were seminarians at Boston College in the middle of a serious bender that started at New Year's and was still going as Easter Sunday rolled around. The woman I hung out with during those few months (some 9 years my senior) roomed with the woman Charlie spent time with and eventually fathered two children with. About five years later we heard of their deaths in a terrible car accident.

After that came Jan W. Her husband was a classmate where I first went to college and we all attended the same church. I had left the city to move up to New Hampshire when I heard of Jan's death when their car went off of Memorial Drive into the Charles River one winter night. Her husband and the children survived. The strangest small world event of my life occurred some 17 years later here on the west coast when I met the woman who had been his second wife for a time. I used to think of Jan often. She had been one of the most even keeled and level headed people I knew.

Another person I think about who has died is someone who may have made my life as it is possible; and since I had not stayed in touch, I did not know about his passage until years afterwards. During the year I went to live with my father I was enrolled in a really good public school, one that you had to test to get into. My French teacher was quite the character. He was referred to as Papa John by some of the kids. He had one of the very first VW bug cabriolets in the city and he used to load it with kids after school and drop them off at their various homes or bus stops on his way to his night job at American Airlines. The kind of positive personal relationships he had with students would probably not be allowed today, and certainly not what he did for me.

About halfway through the school year my father got a job (after being out of work for three years) in another city. John E. approached him with an offer that I could stay with him and finish the school year. John lived with and supported his mother. The second job was so that he could afford the insurance and save the resources she would need if something happened to him. I now suspect that John was in the closet--that he was gay--though he never gave me any reason to think so at the time. Nominally I was being given room and board to take care of walking the dachshund who had caused John's mother to get a broken hip the previous year. John was at work at his night job.

John E. was in my life a lot like the character Sidney Poitier played in "To Sir with Love." The first night in his house for dinner I learned how to eat an artichoke. When I was getting ready for Junior Prom, John took me and a classmate shopping, mostly for Mary S. to find a dress, but we went for a tux rental fitting as well. The expedition was an extensive lesson in manners and public decorum. "No, Mary. Proper young ladies do not smoke on the street."

A regret is that I never stayed in touch with him, but my excuse is that the next two or three years were the toughest of my life as I left the home that had become an alcoholic disaster area and set out to make it on my own. By the time a dozen or so years later that things in my life had stabilized I had no idea how to go about locating him. There was no internet white pages then--no internet at all. A few years ago I was able to find a record about him. It was a reference to his obituary. He had died in the mid eighties. He could not have been more than 55 or 60. So when I think of him I do try to think my thanks for that half year, That full year in that school was a real gift and may well have enabled some things that happened later.

The other person that comes to mind is someone whose death I only found out about last year. One of the first more serious relationships in my life was R. and she found me last year. We've exchanged a few emails but early on she told me that she thought she had found notice of Monte C.'s death in a west coast paper. Monte was one of my bosses when I worked in the Youth Department of the Y. He was African-American, incredibly well educated, and one of the best bosses I ever worked for. My most moving memory of him was when I came in to work one Saturday and he asked me if I had been home. I had not. That spring of my senior year I had often stayed away from home for days at a time. After one memorable drunken screaming scene in the main lobby of the Y while I stood in the doorway to the Youth Department, my father pretty much ignored my absences.

Monte said come with him. Our first stop was at the city hospital where my father was being detoxed from his third intentional overdose of pills in that one year--this time because when his employer had made him join AA, his lover had departed because "Edgar, you're just not any fun anymore." In the hospital my father didn't even look at me. Then Monte had me get back in his car and we drove out to a park by the river where we just walked. He didn't ask me to talk. He didn't say anything. We just walked. I remember that as being cared for in a way that my self-preoccupied alcoholic father was absolutely incapable of.

When I remember what life was like for me then, I think that John and Monte, and there were others, are all that was between me and being institutionalized, jailed, or dead before I was twenty. They may well have been. I only hope that in some small way I have given back in my life some of what I got from them.