I did a big sort-through of Timothy’s things this past Saturday. It was, of course, the anniversary of his funeral at White Eagle, and I guess I felt I needed to tidy my mind as well as the physical universe.
Among the tasks: looking through all the camera SD cards and computer flash-drives. I laughed out loud when I found this on one of his flash-drives I thought was empty:
Fall Down Drunk
A man whose level of drunkenness was bordering on the absurd, stood up to leave the bar and fell flat on his face.
“Maybe all I need is fresh air” he thought as he crawled out the door.
He tried to stand up again but fell face first into the mud.
“Screw it I’ll crawl home.”
The next morning his wife found him asleep on the doorstep.
“You were out drinking at Jack’s again”, she said.
“Uh yah, but how do you know?”
“He called to say you left your wheelchair at the bar again!”
He was a huge fan of John Callahan and his extremely pointed cartoons (you can find the late Callahan’s book Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot on Amazon if you want a sense of both his art and his life). Anyway, that joke could be ripped from a Callahan strip.
Tim, once upon a time, did go out drinking like the legendary guy at Jack’s. But he decided he wanted to live, to play his guitar (and, eventually, do even more interesting things).
By the time we went to FDR’s winter White House, at Warm Springs, Georgia, he was as unlike the guy at Jack’s as possible. How proud and happy we were that the guard, seeing we were the only visitors for miles, took down the velvet rope and rolled FDR’s wheelchair out so Timothy could pose with it.
On Sunday, I also steeled myself to go through a wicker basket of Tim’s things we brought to White Eagle for the funeral. They were part of a Life Parade I arrayed on the windowsill of the lodge. Underneath a pile of programs, I found three wallets I assumed I’d cleaned out long ago. Well, I hadn’t. Mingled in with the California driver’s license, the AIA membership card, and assorted business cards, was cash.
Indeed, I found a gift from Timothy of around $250, including two battered American Express traveller’s checks, probably from the early 2000s. Seeing as it was his money, not mine, I banked it and wrote two checks to two organizations close to his heart. First, Planned Parenthood, because he believed in their fight for a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. Second, WBGO Newark, the NPR jazz radio station he listened to daily when he lived in Jersey and pined for when we lived in Britain and he was stuck with “Jazzless FM.” We listened to WBGO on the internet from the minute such things became possible, in rotation with KJEM (a KNKX partner) and KSDS in San Diego. Oh, and the Retro Cocktail Hour — but that’s a whole ‘nother post.