I am not a people person.
‘The old boys club’ I’d heard about turns out to be completely different than I’d imagined.
Steve was in my club. And I was in his.
On Valentine’s Day, twenty-four years ago, a call came to my home in Portland, Oregon. It was, as I recall, about 10 a.m. We were readying breakfast.
Now, this was before the dawn of cell phones, or even landline phones that displayed telephone numbers, so each call and each answer was a bit of surprise. This one was a big surprise.
“Hi, Dad.” Bret sounded happy and upbeat.
“Hey, bud, how you doing?”
“I’m married, Dad. Teesh and I drove down here yesterday and got married.”
I put my hand over the phone and turned to my wife, Lynn. “Bret and Teesh ran away and got married,” I said.
“What?”
“Bret and Teesh ran away and got married.”
She paused a moment. “Where?”
I turned to the phone again. “Where?”
“Gatlinburg, the Little Log Chapel.”
****
Thus began the adventure of Bret and Teesh as a married couple. They were 23 and 18, together for a couple of years already, much of that time living in Bret’s Mom’s basement, later in an apartment nearby.
I visited once when they were in the apartment. I thought it was awfully well appointed for a couple so new and so young. Over several days, it became clear Teesh had insisted on having the basics of home life — small kitchen appliances, flatware, dishes, furniture, damn near everything — before they moved out of the basement. She didn’t screw around about it — if they didn’t have something, they had to get it or no moving out.
I thought then Teesh was a lot smarter and substantially more practical than the airhead she liked to pretend she was. Nothing has changed my mind about her in that respect ever since.
They have two kids now, a twelve-year-old boy whose appearance favors Teesh and a four-year-old girl who is a dead ringer for little Bret.
To let you know how far Bret and Teesh have come, they took off for St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, a few days before Valentine’s Day because they’d never taken a Honeymoon and, as Teesh put it in a Facebook post, “We learned this past summer we are not promised tomorrow so we decided not to wait.”
Bret’s heart attack, basically. As human beings, we always bow to the unexpected. We have to. It’s the way the world works.
****
My life in the intervening years has itself gone in unexpected directions. Lynn and I split in 1998. It was not a friendly break-up. I had a sort of girl friend — okay, friend with terrific benefits is probably more like it — for several years after that. Since then, aside from the occasional date, I have been alone.
My Valentine’s Day this year was spent alone on my couch, pushing around my cat (I was pissed at her) and reading the news on the New York Times website and the Washington Post website, plus the gossip on Facebook and the occasional glimpse at other websites. OilPrice.com is one of my faves. Crude this afternoon was about $53/barrel. The news in the early days of Trump was alarming. What was unexpected there was Trump himself. Everything else — the chaos, the incompetence, the treason — was absolutely predictable and expected.
About 3 o’clock, I decided pizza and a movie would be nice. The local Family Video leased out half its space to Marco’s Pizza, a relatively new brand around here, so I thought why not hit Marco’s and the video store at the same time. A large pepperoni would be paired with “American Pastoral,” then “Deepwater Horizon,” literary pretensions followed by spurting crude, senseless explosions, great big fires, and numerous deaths.
Well, the pizza was okay. I’ll buy another one. Neither of the movies worked on my DVD player. Bummer!
This is how Valentine’s Day goes on your own. Pizza. A couple of movies that won’t run. An evening, then, with “Criminal Minds” on Ion TV and a laptop on your knees.
I know this sounds completely pathetic, and maybe it is. But I’m actually pretty happy with my life right now. I’ve recovered from a couple of medical problems. One, left untreated, would have killed me. The other would have cost me a foot. I’m pleased to note I’m still alive and still able to walk although there are side effects.
Also, I’m driving a new car and earning money from it by working for Uber.
I have a few old friends — and I’m not kidding about old, they’re my age — I can meet every Wednesday for breakfast. It’s Tuesday evening and I’m planning to see them tomorrow. I have a few more scattered friends — Gerry in Sacramento, Dan in Portland, John in Des Moines, Geirr in New York, Jack in Florida – with whom I am in touch.
I haven’t given up on women, although the last time I asked a woman for a date, she assembled an amused demeanor and informed me she was married, but would I like some whipped cream on my Mocha. I turned wing over, spiraled down trailing thin smoke, ker-whumped on the floor of the coffee shop and burst into flame, smoke wafting away on the HVAC breeze. No, but thank you, I replied.
So it goes.
When I didn’t hear from him for a few months, when there was no response to Sign Of Life requests which had always worked before, I reached out to the family.
There will be no more confidential man-to-man conversations between two guys who know more about produce, fruits & vegetables, than any two writers should.
Steve Beard: Born April 18th, 1944 – Died July 7th 2021