Honoring A Veteran

I just got the news that my old friend Sam passed away, which means the world is decidedly worse than it already was. Sam was old enough, or almost, to be my father, and since I never had a viable one, for at least a decade he played that role. He began spontaneously after I moved and a vicious neighbor legally attacked me. Needless to say, I was stunned. I was also furiously trying to figure out the most ruthless don’t tread on me response to the bastard when Sam called and politely insisted I dial my Scorpio down. I was going to have to live with this misogynist as my neighbor for a long time. “Better,” he said, “to phone him and seek some sort of accord. I know it’s difficult to swallow and make nice to someone so nasty, but if you want to enjoy your place and sleep at night, you have to knock the wind of the blowhard’s sails.”

Sam never tired of teaching me to respond to adversity with grace and to the tedious with charm. And I never tired of taking his advice because he had grace in abundance and what seemed a charmed life. He was a Connecticut Yankee who spoke French, was a Korean War veteran and in his early 60s was a devoted horseman with a seaside house that had enough acreage for a stable and paddock. With a Yale degree behind him, he was hanging onto the family shoe manufacturing business, trying to keep it running when everybody else was running overseas, quietly proud it could support four-dozen local families. He had a Mercedes and private banker and an in for a prime table at Wolfgang Puck's, yet he was a faithful, contributing Democrat of the liberal persuasion and supporter of the ACLU. He believed above all in fairness and decency.

Although Sam was physically small, he never exhibited that Napoleonic need to compensate with grandiosity. His house was a nondescript 1950s ranch with no fancy manicure on the lawn, and his clothes were modestly gray or brown. The calm of his veneer and voice made him seem content with life, and surprisingly with his longtime wife, a handsome dark-eyed woman of skewering wit and refrigerator warmth. He’d met and married her in Connecticut not long after law school at Yale and somewhere among the decades learned to live in what looked like peace with her shrewish blowhard tendencies, uptight taste and scheduling demands. He never complained or let on that he was unhappy in any way.

I was not jealous of his wife. I met her before I met him and we bonded. She was an art historian who liked hanging around younger, creative people and when she found we had a friend in common she became my friend. Over lots of coffee and lunches, I learned she was raised by a domineering narcissist who cared not a whit for her and that the brother she held so dear, her only sibling, committed suicide in his 20s, probably because he was gay. I understood where her hard edge came from but sometimes it drew blood from me and eventually I had to back away.

Knowing his wife as well as I did made me admire Sam's stoicism and think he was a Buddha. In spite of her cutting him off as an ungrateful bastard, Sam kept in contact with their son. He was slightly younger than I and although I never met him, it was easy to figure out, with a second-generation narcissistic iceberg for a mother, how severely troubled he had to be. Enough to self-medicate with drugs somewhere in Manhattan where he supposedly worked as a photographer and videographer and had a girlfriend. I think Sam secretly supported him, something he could never admit to his wife. I can't fathom how painful that must have been. His wife kept her focus on their daughter as her great hope. But the young woman must have been troubled in her own way, for she eloped with a man who was far older and who her mother despised, and almost immediately gave birth back to back to two children, both marred by fetal alcohol syndrome.

Abnormal grandchildren started a pattern of woe that made me wonder what my friend Sam had ever done to end up with the karma of Job. Although he and his business were losing money trying to compete with cheap third world shoe stitchers, he couldn’t bear the thought of shutting down and forcing four dozen local families onto unemployment in a place that had no alternatives. Finally it had to be done, at great personal expense to Sam because the state came after him on some technicality of an economic development package that had helped him keep his factory going that long. With vastly reduced resources, reputation and income, he sold the house with the stables and moved back to the middle of Connecticut not far from where his daughter was. It was his wife’s idea and she hated horses anyway.

Sam was just settling in when his son took ill and died before he could get there. A year later he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease and in no time at all he could no longer ride a horse, drive a car, walk on a sidewalk, feed himself, talk, get out of bed. For two years he watched himself deteriorate enough to need fulltime care, not exactly supplied by his wife. Four days ago, he died. How odd that it was Veterans’ Day because my friend Sam was a courageous warrior. I hope he finds his way to Dewachen, the pure land of no suffering. It is supposed to be overflowing with fairness and decency.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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