Pat Tillman and Other Old Friends

Pat Tillman and Other Old Friends

On Mother’s day this year my wife and I went to Sonoma for a three-day weekend. We traveled with old friends we have known and loved for thirty years.

Our friend Elise had heard of a beautiful B&B in Guerneville, a tiny town near the Coast. When she saw that it had a culinary institute on the grounds she booked it immediately. She then carefully downloaded the menus from every other restaurant within 25 miles. Elise has always been a passionate woman; after they met, Derrick had a happily exhausted look for years. However, that was during the Seventies - a different century. Now, during the last few years, food has become her only passion. (Alas, poor Derrick. I knew him when.)

None of us had been to Guerneville before but it didn’t matter – every town in the Sonoma Valley is surrounded by wineries, and each town and each winery is more beautiful than all the others.

Or so I thought. Guerneville is surrounded by slums. Slums, as Derrick put it, that were probably a lot nicer before the white trash moved out.

We turned off highway 101 (beautiful), drove along about 13 miles of vineyards (very beautiful), entered a dark corridor of gloomy trees and then emerged into… a rural slum in Appalachia. Have you ever wondered where your old car went, the one that you drove in 1968? It’s now in a front yard on the outskirts of Guerneville and weeds are growing through the springs in the back seat. Your 1968 garbage is there, too, in case you need a receipt.

Guerneville itself is touristy, not slummy. It is a major destination for lower class middle aged gay men with friendly smiles and bad teeth, most of whom could use a makeover from someone who has a clue about how to dress. Michael Moore, maybe.

Or even me. On our first morning I bought a ridiculous Australian Outback hat to keep the sun off of my ears (and off my bald spot, which now reaches down to my nipples.) I kept getting admiring comments from gay guys who wanted to know where I bought it. “Walk three houses past the house with the Chevy truck in front and the transmission on the front lawn and…”

And so we relaxed. There is something remarkable is spending time with friends you have known and loved for decades - a comfortable bond that new friendships, regardless of the depth of emotion, cannot emulate. We laughed for three days and then came home early Sunday morning, refreshed. Later I saw a fine parallel: we cut short our vacation with friends we met thirty years ago to spend the rest of Mother’s day with a friend I met over fifty years ago.

Roz Silver will be 94 in July. Our sons have long thought of her as their third grandmother, her two grandchildren are more like their cousins than their friends, and Rozzie is an integral part of our family.

For many years, Roz lived two blocks from my parent’s house in New York. Her son Marty was like a second brother to me as we grew up. In 1973 Marty and his wife moved to the SF Bay Area a few months after my wife and I did; his parents soon followed. For years, our boys knew them better than they knew Sharon’s parents or mine.

Marty died of a massive heart attack in 1979. He was 38; there was no warning. His father died three years later and Roz has been alone ever since. Or she could have been alone. Exhibiting an unflinching courage that John McCain would admire, she resolutely created a life for herself within the San Jose community. She is never alone for a holiday; she turns down as many invitations as she accepts. She has grown to look rather weedy but at her core she is an ancient bonsai, bent and scarred and clinging tenaciously to life, rooted in an insignificant plot of land, nourished by the love of people she met long after she turned eighty.

Last year on Yom Kippur, two months after Roz turned 90, many of us broke fast at a friend’s house. I picked up Roz and she spent the night in her usual fashion, entertaining us with wonderful tales about the lives of our own children – stories we had forgotten but that Rozzie remembers with Hubble-like clarity. Around 10 PM one of the women volunteered to drive her home. I walked them out and saw that the woman was driving her son’s SUV, a corn silo on tractor tires, and that there was no way for Roz to climb up. She tried, failed, and laughed, tried, failed, and laughed, failed again, laughed again, then looked up at me for help.

Roz had been a tall, sturdy, muscular woman, and she had looked me straight in the eye for decades. Now, those decades had taken their toll. She looked up at me. Without thinking I picked her up and gently put her into the passenger’s seat. She was fragile as sea foam, and light, light, astonishingly light. Dust mote light. I have heard about the ‘weight of the years’ and always imagined that it was heavy but I was wrong; as Rozzies’ life evaporates it is taking substance away with it. Traces of life, dust from the wings of a butterfly, are gently fluttering away, floating from my frail friend, and rising, rising. And suddenly I too was lighter. Friendship can be a heavy burden but loving an elderly person, and spending time together for the sheer pleasure of her company, had made me buoyant, lightheaded, weightless.

Our extended family is quite large. It includes people I met last year and people we met as children. I love them all, but there is a sparkling durability to the friendships we made as young people that coats them until they glisten.

In 1980, Sharon and I joined a small social group within our synagogue and the parents and children have remained close ever since. We have watched each other’s children grow up and even enter middle-age; we have gone together from starting careers to ending them; we comfort each other. We age together.

Best are the friendships from childhood. I had four extremely good friends in high school and remain close with three of them. One lives in New Jersey, one in North Carolina, and one in Florida yet I have seen them all twice within the last twelve months. Sharon and I are blessed. Love is a constant in our lives.

I think the irresistible force of childhood friendship explains why our son Eric took the death of Pat Tillman so hard. They were together every day of every school year, from kindergarten through high school graduation. They played soccer together at four and five – I was the coach - and then, throughout high school, played on a succession of progressively better football teams.

In 1994, their senior year, when Pat became locally famous for flying tackles, Eric was almost as admired, almost as feared on the field. He was literally the strongest person in the history of Leland High School – he set a record in every lifting category – and he brought that raw strength plus an intellectual dedication to the playing field. As seniors, their modest team won several championship titles that should have been beyond their reach. The team bonded with that irresistible, lifelong bond of youth.

Pat Tillman was the first of Eric’s friends to die. Any cause of death - aneurysm or drive-by shooting - would have been tragic. But dying in such a noble cause was so extraordinary… Eric will still be learning lessons from Pat forty years from now, when he plays with his grandchildren as I do today.
About ten days after Pat was slaughtered (for reasons that remain murky), the City held a memorial service in his honor. The service was a nationwide event, covered by all the networks and carried in its entirety by ESPN. It became a media circus, with speeches by Maria Shriver, John McCain, etc. 3,500 people showed up. Most had never heard of Pat before that week and few cared that he would have hated every minute of the spectacle.

Sharon, Seth, and I chose not to go. We didn’t want a collective memory superimposed over our own. Also, Eric and I had already been interviewed by ABC News and I had been contacted by People Magazine, and I didn’t want to struggle with more questions about a young man I admired but hardly knew. (This shows how pathetically desperate reporters can be – fighting to interview some guy who coached the Fallen Warrior when he was four years old.)

Eric went, as was proper. Just about everyone on that astonishing 1994 Senior Year Leland High School football team went, in grim reunion. At his request I taped the entire service. I tried to avoid watching it but near the end I happened to see Pat’s dad address the crowd and the national audience. I cannot imagine Pat Sr.’s emotions as he thought about his son: high school hero, college all-star, NFL player, Army Ranger, sacrificial lamb. He spoke from prepared notes and I forget what he said. But to this day I remember his last sentence. He wanted to summarize his son’s life and he did so perfectly. He mentioned not one of his young son’s many famous accomplishments. Instead, he reached back to obscurity, to what counted most in his son’s life. He said, “And one last thing to remember. Not even G-d could have made the 1994 Leland High School football team.”

Pat Tillman Sr. is a wonderful if imperfect man. A man with a temper. A brooding sort. But he understood that he was teaching our nation a great lesson. At the end of the day, after fame and accomplishments wither, old friendships remain the most important constants in our lives. We age, but old friendships grow more beautiful.

© Jacob Arthur