Egret on Beach

Due to circumstances beyond our control, some of which may become apparent in the following, I have decided to revive “The Skinny Island Post” yet again.  Veteran readers of this blog have been exposed, for better or worse, to near daily minutia of life in The Little Hacienda on Skinny Island, The First Farewell Tour, Spain and Portugal, The Second Farewell Tour, and last fall’s extraordinary trip to Cuba.  And while I hope you have been entertained and a little informed, a lot of water has passed under the proverbial bridge since last we published, and a new phase has been entered here on Skinny Island which urges some reflection and clarification. We will, of course, continue the traditions for which the Post is famous: expositions of the mundane and quirky observed in the plants, animals, and weather of Skinny Island, as well as the occasional philosophical aside.

Heartbreak and heart surgery.  One not often seen following the other, but I have experienced both in the past few months and I’m still recovering.  I lost two very dear friends of long-standing within a couple of weeks of each other, while experiencing a rather abrupt decline in my own cardiac health.  Mortality barged in unannounced this spring and early summer.

Early one morning, while preparing for my last outdoor art show of the season, I received a message stating that my old friend Ron Williams had suffered a stroke in Denver and was in critical condition.  Not long after, another message came through saying  he had died.  I was flattened.  I knew he’d had some long-standing heart issues and, in an effort to gain from his insight and experience, we had been engaged for several weeks in phone discussions about my own, very similar problems, but this was completely unexpected.  Ron was an energetic, dynamic, sixty-five year old consummate musician, composer, and conductor, the founder and director of several chorale groups in the Denver area.  I had known him since the eighth grade, some fifty years.  Our mutual interest in music led to our forming a folk group, with friend Joe Kelly, and we won our high school talent show our junior year.  Ronnie could play anything: piano, cello, baritone horn, upright bass, guitar; and he played them all very well.  I was essentially an observer.  I was a frequent guest in the rather busy and rambunctious Williams house over several years, and among my fondest memories are the times I just sat by the piano and listened to Ronnie play.  He went into the Marines right out of high school, then Viet Nam, and on his return to Tallahassee and FSU, he moved into the attic of the Sigma Phi Epsilon house where I was residing.  We remained close through college years, then drifted apart as marriage, kids and work drew us in different directions.  We hooked up again for good after Ronnie moved to the Denver area.  We e-mailed and spoke by phone frequently, following each other’s artistic endeavors and offering support and encouragement.  As part of The Second Farewell Tour we stopped and had a wonderful lunch with Ron and Joan in Denver before start the long trek back to Florida.  In the past few years we had begun collaborating again; me adding lyrics to some of Ron’s compositions, some of which were performed by his chorale groups.  He asked if I would provide liner notes for a CD of his piano improvisations, and I was honored to do so.  We discussed plans for more extensive collaboration, made all the more exciting for me when Ron and Joan confirmed they were moving back to Florida by the end of summer.  We had begun the outline for a pretty major effort, a musical entitled “Dinner on the Grounds,” the title based on an event immersed in our mutual  Methodist upbringings.  Sadly, it was not to be.  My friend Ron was a genius.  Music consumed him, but he gave it back.  His talent was and is a bottomless well.  I miss him every day.

About two weeks later I had an electro cardioversion to correct a heart arrhythmia.  As I was being assisted into a wheelchair to leave the hospital following the procedure, I received a phone call from the son of another friend, Dean Glosson, informing me that Dean had died of a heart attack the night before while jogging.

I met Dean in late 1969, in San Antonio, where we were training as combat medics.  We hit it off right away, an odd friendship really, a Florida beach boy and an Illinois farm boy, but it stuck.  We learned of a school we could attend after basic medic training that would keep us in San Antonio another year, the Clinical Specialist Course, essentially an LPN course, and we both signed up.  With Peter Young, a lanky, unique Maine farmer, who was in the class ahead of us, we got an apartment off base while waiting for our girlfriends to join us.  It was an extraordinary period of music, pot smoking, skill learning, and growing up.  I found Dean to be an exceptionally honest, genuinely good person, somewhat amazed at my rather erratic interests, but never judgmental.  He went home on leave, married his sweetheart Frannie, and brought her back to San Antonio about the time Barbara graduated FSU and joined me.  We rented places a street apart and within short walking distance of Ft. Sam Houston.   The bonds between the four of us deepened as we struggled, mostly happily, to make our way, really on our own for the first time, even as we dreaded the end of the course and our orders.  But Providence smiled.  We both got orders for Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC.  Barbara and I drove back to Florida, (with our little dog, Jimmy,) got married, and headed up to DC.  The first year we and the Glossons lived quite a distance apart in the near suburbs.  Their son Josh was soon born.  Our second year there Barbara found a lovely little apartment building in Tacoma Park, MD, and we all moved onto the second floor, Dean and Frannie’s apartment diagonally across the hall from ours, with Rides at the Door, a Lakota Sioux, between.  Two other couples from Walter Reed followed as apartments became available, and there ensued, on reflection now, perhaps the most idyllic few months of our life.  We were all extremely close and very happy.  My work with Dean at Walter Reed, especially the many night shifts we pulled together, served to form me from a kid to a man, as my respect for my totally unpretentious friend deepened.  After our discharges, Dean and Frannie went back to McHenry, Illinois, and Barbara and I back to Florida.  Dean started working construction, and was soon building houses on his own, and a very successful career.  We saw them in ’74 when we took a wonderful train trip  out to Colorado, they came to Florida shortly after, and again in the 80s.  We stayed in touch, more so as our working lives began to wind down.  Dean essentially retired from building, (after building their splendid house) and started doing concrete finishing part-time.  They came down three years ago and spent some time with us in The Little Hacienda. We spent several wonderful days at Frannie’s family Lake Michigan Cottage a year later, then shared a cabin on Lake Superior in the UP as part of The Second Farewell tour just two years ago.  I am so glad we did that.  It was the last time we saw Dean.  A lasting image is of three of us sitting bundled against the cold on the shore while Dean took a plunge in the frigid lake.  He may have been the kindest person I’ve ever known, a truly devoted husband, father, and grandfather . . . and friend.  Nine-hundred people came to his wake.   I talk to him every day.

So, it was with a weary, heavy, and increasingly damaged heart, that I began the process to repair a by now very leaky Mitral valve.  I had a cardiac catheterization, a trans-esophageal echo-cardiogram, and surgery to repair the valve was scheduled for June 10th. Over the ensuing 2 weeks of waiting my symptoms worsened severely.  I was short of breath with the slightest exertion, my pulse was erratic, and my energy level at just about zero.  The day finally arrived and I turned myself over to the skill of a Daytona thoracic surgeon.  On awaking from anesthesia I learned, groggily, not that the surgery was a success, but that the surgeon discovered, via another trans-esophageal echo, (they didn’t open me up,) that my condition was worse than he’d anticipated, and might require support and ultimate transplant, something they couldn’t do at this hospital.  He’d made a call to a very prominent surgeon at UF/Shands hospital in Gainesville, who said to send me up.  I made the trip by EVAC, had to wait another full day, then had successful repair of both the mitral and tricuspid valves.  The Shands team, starting with Dr. Tomas Martin, were superb, and I was out of bed and walking the next day.  Recovery the first few weeks at home was slow, painful, and tedious, but something has kicked in the past few days and I’m doing much  better.

Both before the surgery and after I’ve had a lot of time to think about Ron and Dean, what they gave me, the beauty and fragility of life, the meaning of friends, my own mortality and, not insignificantly, my personal theology.  Still working.  It’s a process, but I’m damn happy to be alive here in The Little Hacienda on Skinny Island.  Stay tuned.