Page 2: Jutta the sandal hutt
As I get further and further into middle age, which is like being stuck in the middle of the ocean equidistant from both shores, I find myself transitioning from being a last-minute guy to an 11th hour guy. Progress.
In this 11th hour, I am busy trying to complete a final insurance claim for the February 6 Round Fire regarding the contents that were in my former home in Swall Meadows.
Of course, I am sick of thinking about the fire. I’ve moved on. My wife has moved on. It’s like wrangling a cat (or a goat?) to get her to sit down long enough to answer my questions.
Ted: So … how many pairs of shoes did you have?
Sabrina (sheepishly): Do I have to answer that?
Ted: Yes, if we want to get paid.
Sabrina: They’re going to think I’m a freak.
Now I know this is the point where I’m supposed to interject and say, “No, no honey. You’re not a freak.” But I really want to get this done. I stay on task.
Ted: Come on. How many shoes?
Sabrina: Shoes … or boots? Or sandals? I bought these Jutta Neumann sandals last year …
We pause to go over the spelling of Jutta Neumann.
Ted: So you bought them last year. Okay. What did they cost?
Sabrina (sheepishly): Do I have to answer that?
I coax it out of her. The sandals were $310. I maintain a poker face. I circle back around to the shoes and boots question, but then our three-year old interjects and Sabrina gets distracted.
Ted: Shoes and boots?
My poker face is strained. We’re never going to get this thing done. The kid wants a snack. Sabrina gets up to fix it. I follow her into the kitchen, my laptop balanced upright in the crook of my left arm.
Ted: 20 pairs?
This was a hopeful suggestion. She looks at me like I am the dumbest man on Earth. I would maintain I am tied for dumbest … with approximately 3.5 billion others. My daughter interjects again.
Ted: Please …
I am begging now. She feels sorry for me. She settles on thirty pairs of shoes and thirty pairs of boots but really, she acknowledges the number is definitely low. Then she started playing Mad Libs with a few of the really nice pairs.
Sabrina: There were some vintage boots in there that I’d had for years. You know, I remember this pair of (name of brand) boots that I bought in (geographical location). They were (color) and I can remember wearing them to (life event). I bought them for (price, in dollars or euros). I’ll bet you they’re worth (price, in dollars or euros) today. You just can’t find boots like that anymore …
Of course, it took a lot of generosity and effort from a lot of folks to reach this point of levity – many of whom were never publicly acknowledged. I think particularly of Gerren Philbrook, whom we had chosen to rebuild our house … until we decided not to rebuild and purchased a home in Bishop instead. We wasted his time. I asked him to bill me for his wasted time. He never did. He’s a fine man and a fair man. If I were to ever build a home in the Eastern Sierra, he’s the guy I’d call first.
Then there was that email from Donalda Day, a Swall Meadows resident whose home did not burn. She immediately volunteered as the de facto neighborhood mama bear after the fire, keeping people informed about this and that. She wrote an email one day saying there was a couple that wanted to donate iPads and laptops to anyone who’d had such items burn in the fire. I am reminded of this because my daughter is sitting right next to me watching a Peppa Pig video on a donated Macintosh laptop as I write this. The couple turned out to be Kim and Sean Frank. I don’t think we ever properly thanked them.
These are just two examples. My list of people who lent me a hand during 2015 could go on for pages. I’m sure others’ lists would be just as long.
In the aftermath of the fire, people would empathize and express how difficult it must be to have one’s house burn down.
Not as difficult as experiencing the loss of a loved one, I would reply. Or divorce. Or debilitating illness. Or even being out of work. On a scale of “tragedies,” having one’s house burn down lines up as definitely second-tier.
I say this because it was such an unusually heavy year when it came to death … not only locally, as many prominent members of the community died, but personally, as my father passed away in August.
Which confirmed what I already knew. That the Round Fire was a second-tier event.
Now if you’ll allow me to indulge myself a bit further, the following is excerpted from the eulogy I gave at Dad’s memorial service.
Dad’s coming down with M.S. at age 47 pretty much had him convinced he wasn’t going to live very long.
Which is perhaps why he lived so well, with such enthusiasm. He was just so happy to wake up every day.
I remember when, after about a 20-year hiatus, Dad proudly announced that he had decided to get back on his downhill skis with his Aspen has-been group – a group of his Dartmouth classmates held a mini-reunion in Aspen every year (Dad grew up in Denver and used to visit Aspen in the ‘40s with his father, who was an accountant for some of the mining firms there. They used to stay at the Hotel Jerome for a few dollars), and one year dad just decided what the heck? So what if he could only ski the bunny slopes? Plenty of the others only skied the bunny slopes, too.
He also pointed out that as his classmates aged, many of them regressed to the mean, so to speak. Sure, he was slow, but he was catching up.
Dad always had thrill for a bit of speed or adventure. Even towards the very end, when he was at the Kendal (assisted living facility), there was this particular inclined ramp/walkway, and whenever we came to it – and I am convinced that when I was there he would find excuses to direct me to this walkway – then he’d tell me to give the chair a little push and let go, allowing him to cruise to the bottom.
There were few rules that Dad didn’t enjoy breaking … I’m not sure that this was a conscious decision so much as Dad just did what Dad did. He didn’t really care whether it was allowed or not.
I can still remember busting him out of the Kendal during a quarantine lockdown (every time there was even a hint of flu, they’d close the joint) just because he was going stir-crazy in there. He ordered me to push his wheelchair right out the front door. Don’t make eye contact, he whispered to me, and they won’t stop us.
They didn’t.
He was a reluctant patient, and this speaks to a dichotomy within Dad. On the one hand, he told me, quite bluntly, and this was obviously influenced by his own father dying in post-op at the age of 56, “Don’t go to hospitals. People die there.”
On the other hand, Dad did have faith in other people’s expertise. He was optimistic in that regard.
I remember asking him one time about how he chose the companies he invested in. Dad was always fond of companies with a strong history that had maybe gone through a recent, difficult period.
If the core business is good, he would say, it’s only a matter of time before a smart guy comes along and straightens it out.
And that is not lost on me about Dad. He really was a man who had a unique love of the world, of other people. He recognized the talents of others and was quick to cheer them on, without envy or jealousy. He wanted everyone to succeed in whatever way they wished to succeed.
In one’s youth, this can prove somewhat frustrating, because you want your Dad to care most of all about you.
But as you get older, you recognize how wonderful, how rare his generosity of spirit.
And then, once you have your own family, your own business, your own responsibilities, you really start to see it, recognize it, remember it … the particular cadence of his M.S.-affected walk as he’d trudge out the door at 6:15 every day, the way he never, ever complained about his M.S., the simple pleasures he enjoyed and his utter lack of concern for material things – he had one set of Japanese golf irons he brought home from Tokyo after the service. Never saw a reason to own anything newer. Never bought a ball because you could always find another one in the weeds. Would store the clubs under a cottage at Twin Lakes Village (an unassuming New England summer resort which features several stand-alone cabins, a main lodge with dining room, a par three golf course and a few tennis courts fenced in with chicken wire) each winter and then retrieve them the one time a year he’d play. He could shoot near par off the couch any day of the week without practice, without a wood in his bag, without balance (thanks to the M.S.) and with half the strength he should’ve had.
But quite frankly, golf bored him. It was too slow.
I am the exact same age he was when he came down with the MS. He was brave in that moment. Brave all along but especially in that moment, in the summer of ‘77.
Of course, he never would have described himself as brave … that was a term he reserved for combat soldiers.
But as I grow older, I watch all around me as people psychologically, emotionally, financially … they blow themselves up. They fold under pressure. They assign blame. They live in a mirror-less reality.
Dad never whined, complained, cursed the gods, made excuses. He … just … kept … going.
It’s funny. My 3-year old is at the age where she can hear any story a zillion times. The latest obsession is about the tortoise and the hare. I remember as a kid always having a real soft spot for the hare. I mean, he should’ve won, right? He would’ve won 99 times out of 100.
But lately, I think to myself, how heroic it was for my Dad, the ultimate tortoise, to stay in the race. He carried that big shell of a physical handicap on his back for the whole 2nd half of the race. But he finished, damnit, and he finished strong and with joy.
He refused, refused to give in.
When he was in the hospital in late July, the beginning of the end, my sister stayed with him during the nights because he kept trying to rip all the tubes out that they’d stuck in him. And he was a little high on morphine. But one night, about 2 a.m., he calls for Meg, and she comes to him, and he whispers to her, “Hey, you know, if you can just help me get down to the floor, I think I can crawl out of here.”
Pop was a man of civility and even temperament. He may have been a lifelong Republican, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t open to hearing many points of view. There was no way he would have supported men like Trump or Cruz who are so crass. He would have shuddered at the thought of sending such men abroad as representatives of this country.
