Bob

I don't pay a lot of attention to dreams or read too much into what they might mean. The only reoccurring dream I ever had was this one that hit me two or three times in my twenties, and it was hard to shake. It went like this:

I enter a large room where there's a lot of people and a lot of chairs. I mill around with unfamiliar people until I recognize one of them. It's someone I haven't seen for years. We sit down and start to talk.

The people around us start to leave. As the crowd thins out, I become aware that there is a casket in the front of the room. But we keep chatting. And before long, it's just the two of us.

Eventually, in that weird, slow intuition you have in dreams, I become aware that the casket in the room is empty, and that this bizarre, funeralesque gathering we're at is actually for the person I'm talking to. I also know that this person will sit and talk to me for as long as I stay there, but as soon as I leave, he will have to get up walk to the casket, lie down, and that will be that. Although his life is largely over, the duration this last little stretch of being a living, talking being is up to me.

The conversation continues, wanders, lulls... I think of everything I can to keep it going, but I'm fighting against the silence of the room and the bleakness of the empty chairs until eventually all I can think to do is look at him and say, "hey, man... look..." and the other person just says, "I know." And I always wake up at this point.


One day in first grade, Mrs. Cleaver called Bob to the front of the class.    When he arrived at her desk, we watched with rapt attention as she produced an eye patch, placed it gently over his head and situated it on his left eye.  We all had the same question.  Some of us asked it out loud. "Why are you putting it over his good eye?"

Mrs. Cleaver explained that it was supposed to force Bob's other eye, the one with the conspicuous problems, to work harder so it could become stronger.

Bob turned and faced the class.  The eye patch had a small embroidered image of a waving astronaut on its front.   Bob raised his right hand and waved, striking the exact same pose.  While we laughed, Bob walked counterclockwise around the circular table at front of Mrs. Cleaver's room and touched each of us on the head.

If you grew up with him, it's easy to talk about Bob without talking about his appearance.  The first time I saw him was in probably Sept of 1973. I was in nursery school. He was sitting with kids at the front table of the room and laughing.  He looked different, but most of the kids did too. I'd never seen anyone with curly hair or freckles either, and here they all were.   Young kids get (and often earn) the reputation of being inherently cruel to people who are different, but that really swings both ways. They're also really good at accepting and moving on.

I think, if a person were to walk into Bob's class at any point in our early development and ask us which kid he was, we'd have been more likely do describe him as the "guy in the striped shirt" rather than the "kid with the uneven face".

By the time we got to kindergarten, the class moms had gotten to know one another and I learned something about Bob that wasn't true for anyone else in our class. He wasn't supposed to be alive. That's a pretty heavy truth for a five-year-old to process.   And yet, he was funny and kind.   There was never any heaviness about him.  Here are a couple of way-points on the journey to my understanding of Bob.


In the playground of the elementary school was a wooden square frame that had once been a sandbox, but in the mid- seventies reverted to just being a wooden square -- which served as the boundaries for pretend forts, wide balance beams for "absolute beginner" gymnasts, and obstacles over which kids jumped imaginary dirt bikes. One day, at noon recess, I found Bob crouched in the middle of it digging a small hole and laughing the exaggerated fiendish laughter of a cartoon villain. He saw me approach.

"You see this?" he said, pointing to a small lumpy thing on the ground.

"What is it?"

"It's a pine tree seed.   I'm planting it."

"Why?"

He dropped the seed into the hole and pushed the dirt back over it.

"Because someday, a TREE will grow right on the middle of this sandbox! Ha-HA!"

Bob said "Ha-HA" a lot.  More than most.


At some point in middle school, there were rumors of a talent show. Bob sketched out for me the details of an act he was envisioning. It involved a cigar, a trench coat, a loincloth, and a recording of Steve Martin's King Tut. Say what you want, but those are the raw ingredients of some very bold performance art.


When we were freshmen, Bob was catching some grief from an older kid. He was talking about fighting the guy.

"I'm not afraid of him."

"Well, then, you're an idiot," I said. "He'll kill you in a fight."

"I didn't say I'd win.   I said I wasn't afraid."

And that shut me up pretty effectively.


There are a couple of reprehensible behaviors that emerge around the loss of people.  One of them is the exaggeration of friendship.  I'd like to be absolutely clear that I'm not doing that.

Bob and I never hung out outside of school.  We didn't talk on the phone.  I don't think I cut a particularly large path through his life.  The time we spent together was facilitated by being constantly in the same homeroom (except 4th grade), being in marching band, and the fact that we both received the same novelty gift catalog in the mail at some point in 1981.  We spent a year rereading it and talking about it, and that, for some reason, began our habit of always eating lunch together.  There was some overlap in our interests.  We got along and liked a lot of the same things. We both watched cartoons long after kids our age stopped watching them.   He admitted it.   I didn't.

But for us to have been friends, friends in a way that mattered, I would have had to overcome my basic fear of seeing what his life was like outside of school.  And once school was over, we went from talking every day to having exactly three interactions.


I ran into him a couple of years after we got out of college, which gave me the false impression that this sort of chance meeting would be happening a lot.  It was the first time we'd seen each other since graduation.  We compared notes. Both of us had communication degrees. The pointlessness of that was sinking in on both of us.

The next time we talked, it was because he called me.   He was working for the county and had a question about a building I lived near. We shot the shit a little. We said those things people honestly mean when they say them, like, "let's keep in touch". And then a couple of years went by.

The next time I saw him, also the last time, was when his dad died.

Bob's face was changeless.   When you saw him, you were looking at the same face from kindergarten, from middle school, from graduation, plus or minus a gross teenage mustache or dopey-looking goatee (if it pleases the court, I also plead guilty on both charges).

I walked up and shook his hand, offered my condolences.  He smiled, he thanked me, he leaned in and said softly, trying to minimize my embarrassment, that he had no idea who I was.  I'd forgotten that we're not all frozen in time.

We shot the shit a little. We said those things people honestly mean when...

You get the idea.


Bob's mom died at the end of June, and I didn't go.   I intended to, but things got weird at work and I was late getting home.  I could have rushed getting cleaned up, skipped dinner and gone, but I didn't. I justified it to myself by promising to send him a card with a note asking to get together.   And the card sat on the dining room table for a couple of weeks.

I sent the card so late that it felt aggressively rude, like I'd be ripping open a partially healed wound. But I think that's just a lie people tell themselves when they don't know what to say.  I've listened to heavily bereaved people addressing this very point, that the sense of loss isn't something that goes away and then gets reignited the way a toothache is forgotten until you bite into a Klondike bar.   I wrote the note.   I found a stamp.  And after a few days of riding around with it in my car, I mailed it.



In the following weeks, I made a point of answering calls from unfamiliar numbers.   I checked my email more frequently than I usually do.   I lounged with that comfortable feeling of the ball being in someone else's court.   And I had a brief, celebratory moment weeks later when I saw Bob's photo on Facebook.  Here he was!  At last joining the middle-aged fray of classmates who would love to see him, who would make him feel warm and welcome in the wake of his most terrible loss. 

But it wasn't that at all.   It was a funeral notice.  Bob was gone.


The other reprehensible behavior you see in action when someone dies is some people bragging about how sad they are in comparison to the others.  There's often some human turd who says with his actions, if not his words, "I know you're upset, but I'm really, really deeply upset...so much more upset than you could imagine".  And I'd like to be just as clear on this point as I was on the last that, yes.   That is totally what I am doing.  100%.  Straight up.  The night I found out about Bob, I came un-goddamned-done.

And I don't know why.  Bob isn't the only friend I've lost.  He's not even the first one from our cafeteria table, the Island of Misfit Toys that it was.  There's no reason that his passing should have hit me as hard as it did considering that I hadn't been motivated to contact him at some point when it could have meant something.

I can't tell if I've just mythologized Bob out of my own need to justify how badly I'd handled things, or if my sadness comes from his death happening in the midst of my glib relief of thinking that I'd outwitted the voice that whispered "tick-tock, asshole" in my ear every time I put off writing a letter. There's not a lot of utility in either my grief or my ruminating over it, unless you, the unlikely few who've stuck it out through however many paragraphs this is, have someone you know full well that you should be talking to right now.  We realize it, right?  We know that Time, if you give it any excuse at all, will stab your face with a dull blade and twist it until it snaps at the hilt and then look you right in the eye and say, "Look, it's not me. *I* didn't change.   This is on you, Jack."


I didn't know anyone at the funeral home when I went to see Bob. I'd never met anyone in his family who is still alive. The twenty or thirty people that were there for him were all in the room adjacent to the viewing area.  I nodded, smiled and excused my way past them until I was in the room where Bob was.  For the moment, seemingly against all odds, he was by himself.  It was just the two of us. All of the seats in the room were empty.

The vague dread I'd had on my way to the viewing narrowed into a focused certainty that every memory that I had of him, and any that might come to me in the days ahead, would be refracted through the lens of this experience which so clearly recalled the stark dreams from twenty years ago, standing alone with Bob in a room full of empty chairs, in the long, silent space after the clarifying moment when I should have woken up.