For Tuesday, January 19, 2010
umpire: “In medieval France, a noumpere was a person without peer or pair –- that is, someone who could either be fair in rendering a judgement because bound to no one party or family, and not paired in the sense of being part of a team in a competition. The word entered Middle English in that form, but in time, it lost its initial letters to become the modern ‘umpire.’”
It could not always be said that he was fair in rendering a judgement, so moved to indignation was he with what he felt was unfair. But his temper, oddly enough considering all of the fowl tempers I had already encountered, was one of the things I will always love most deeply about him. He was so close to perfect in so many ways that this human foible made him feel more real, in fact, and therefore nearer to me.
In another way, though, he was not bound to one party or family, although I know he loved us more than he could love or would have loved anyone. But it was his sense of duty to the world that moved him beyond the boundaries of the thing he loathed most –- tribalism -- and therefore remains the characteristic that best reminds me how lucky I was to have him in my life. He could have chosen anyone, been chosen by anyone, but he chose me. If that sounds vain, I say it with only gratitude and surprise, even after all of these years.
It’s funny, too, reading this entry for umpire, because he was, after all, a Libran, the sign specially allocated to judgement and finding balance, and we often talked about how the search for that illusive moderation, that perfect harmony, was the driving force behind so much of that other anger –- the one that gnawed at him day-to-day, especially at his work, where he spent too much of his life trying to make everything right for other people and trying to correct the impossible mistakes, and repercussions, of war.
Despite this angst, he used to come home from his office in January laughing, in search of a warm towel to soak up the ice pellets that had hammered at his bald head, mopping up his scalp, reminding me of Mikhail Gorbachev because they shared the same kind of scar. It wasn’t unusual for him to sling his son’s newspaper bag over his shoulder, and march straight out again into the cold with the undelivered papers, and then return home to whip up four different dinners while I was working my shift at the bar. Thank God for people who cook, I used to say.
And as he lay dying, his body overtaken by another kind of cold -- a cold I could not assuage -– I never thought, still never quite believe, that he would die so young, so suddenly, so shabbily treated by a medical system that claimed to save lives. The night before he died, he could no longer open his eyes (I think on account of the creatine), so I read him poetry from the Norton Anthology, which he would recite back to me line by line, in perfect rhythm, each word and each non-word in place. The last full sentence he spoke to me, or to anyone, was, “Are you all right?” “I’m all right,” I said. “Are you?” “I’m all right,” he said.
Six years may seem like a short time to most of you, and for sure that can often feel true. But nothing has felt longer to me than the absent sounds of his beautiful cadent voice, his unexpected deep-throated laugh, his Florsheim shoes clicking on the pre-dawn cement as he made his way off for the day, or the whispered hush of his anger as he tried, harder than anyone I know, to determine what was fair.
I can tell you what’s fair. But I could not have told him.
Nothing.
~In loving memory of Don Ives, who died January 19, 2004
