Commentary: Just before dark, under a vast high-desert sky, we sit at tables around a backyard swimming pool, and Megan McQueen is singing her heart out.
Our host has lost weight, and is using a cane. Months ago, on a hot spring day, we visited through the closed window of his room in a rehab center, kidding around by phone, pandemic-style. He was lying down, weak after his stroke. Sounding like a kid whose parents had bought front-row baseball tickets, he said Megan wanted to give him and his wife a private concert once he recovered. Tonight, introducing Megan and friends, he recalls: “I needed something to look forward to.” And to share with us.
Lives, like snowflakes, look alike to the casual observer, but no two have exactly the same shape, and each affects countless other lives, in greater or smaller ways, uniquely.
To Megan, our host is a friend and fan. To his kids, he gave them life, offered an example of how to live it, and undoubtedly frustrated the hell out of them sometimes, as they did him. To his wife, he’s a huge part of everything – she was unimaginably young when they met. To the fifty of us gathered, he’s a fun-loving good friend, trusted advisor, and reliable neighbor.
Across the pool, the Preacher’s kid, maybe 10, brings a smile to our lips, his fist a microphone as he silently sings along, as expressive as the star he imagines he is, his sunglasses completing the effect. I’d photograph him if I had my camera. Others do so, with cellphones. What will this celebratory evening mean to him, decades hence? Another vague childhood memory of twilight, good music, and a loving attitude in the air, that slips into his mind now and then, never quite identifiable, with a sense that there was something special, particularly to the grownups?
One guy recalls how he and our host beat the hell out of each other in Montana high school football, half a century ago, each school so small that they played both offensive and defensive line, battling each other all game. Our hostess ran track. As they sit here, appreciating this moment with a special depth, I wonder how they would explain to their younger selves feeling, a lifetime later, both diminished and much richer.
Our host puts down his cane and asks his sweetheart to dance. You can’t miss how much they appreciate each other at this moment, dancing yet again. (Most moving dance I’ve seen since watching a close friend dance at his daughter’s wedding not long after his heart attack, the stark Organ Mountains behind them.)
We enjoy chatting with two vibrant women in their late eighties at our table. They’re longtime friends. When Megan’s husband, Matt Reiter, sings “Sweet Caroline,” they recall hearing Neil Diamond at the Pan Am Center, forty years ago, with their now-departed husbands.
As Matt sings, “Stuck in the Middle with You,” I wonder what bizarre cast of “clowns and jokers” our host met on his interrupted stroll across death’s unguarded border, just before some medical magic jerked him back into this life. “I died twice,” he says. “I didn’t even know it.”
This evening he’s fully alive, and we all share in his joy and gratitude, acutely aware that life is to savor.
Most of life doesn’t turn out quite as we’d planned. Tonight does.