Gratitude Monday: Wunderbaren Freundschaft

My friend Dick and his wife have been on a Grand Tour of Mittel Europa. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been their e-letter carrier for periodic updates of the trip. Dick types a brief blurb on his iPod, attaches a picture and sends it to me; I pass it on to about 30 people.

But the precision-timed itinerary ran into a snag in Dresden, when a luggage-bump at a train station turned into a hematoma and as of Saturday the 24^th landed Dick in hospital for draining and observation. There were a couple of setbacks, including a second procedure on Monday and a “healing will be slow and precarious” prognosis, which is not something you ever want to hear about your own or anyone else’s health.

Plus, keep in mind, that Dick’s caregivers' first language is not English, and consider how hard it is to understand your doctors when they are allegedly speaking the same language as you, and you get an idea for the anxiety level that must have been underlying the situation for Dick and his wife Carolyn. Not to mention all the people on the email lists, to whom I was sending the updates.

(By the way, dealing with a device whose primary purpose is not writing large amounts of text, while under the influence of pain and whatever drugs they’re giving him for pain, Dick gave up fighting with Nanny Autocorrect, and Carolyn has now been renamed Carolun for some weird Apple-related reason. Which MS Word does not like, but suck it up, Microsoft; in this instance iOS rules.)

But at last email received (on Saturday), Dick was okayed to leave the hospital yesterday, and they arrived in Berlin safely to complete the last few days of their trip, with the support of a pair of aluminum crutches for him. I am just about to process the first couple of sit-reps from the Tiergarten area.

And here’s the thing: it’s Gratitude Monday and for the past week I have become acutely aware of how deeply grateful I am to have Dick as a friend for the past 20 years.

We met in the choir of St. Anne’s in Reston—he has a lovely baritone—but we didn’t really get beyond the basics until I moved to the UK, and discovered he had an email account. Then we exchanged jokes that were making the rounds, and I got involved in some of the discussions he and his various friends were having about current and historical events.

When I returned to the US at the end of 2001, broken in many ways, Dick was one of the first and most consistent of my supporters. I am never going to be able to drink sangria without thinking of the lunch he took me to at El Manantial in the Tall Oaks shopping center. He bravely sat through me showing him photo scrapbooks of my last two years in Europe. He probably wished he’d ordered more sangria, but he never let it show.

Dick is not the, ah, most technically astute person of my acquaintance. By which I mean he uses Apple products, has had AOL as his ISP since Internet Year Dot, and has never seemed interested in any of the underpinnings of email, web pages or productivity software. This is great for me, because I’m an application product manager and it is absolutely crucial to remember that we’re supposed to be building these things to make people’s lives easier, not to come up with the coolest crap with the most complexity you can cram in per release.

I love it that Dick stops me in my tracks when I assume some level of understanding that he doesn’t possess—and nor should he. I sometimes get to be the one who guides him through some application-induced terrors, and I always find it illuminating when I have to strip down a piece of software’s purpose and operations to its barest essentials to walk him through it.

It’s also good exercise for my communication skills, because this has been done via email or IM. I sent him a step-by-step guide for setting up a blog on Blogger, because I’ve been hoping for years that he’s going to start systematically sharing his life experiences with us all. See below about the need for memoirs.

(I will confess that my attempts to get Dick to read my posts actually on the blog, so I get the “traffic”, have been utterly futile because I’ve not been able to set him up with an iGoogle-type easily-clickable link, and anything more complex won’t work for him. So for the past few years he’s received a system-generated email with the entire post, so he never has to go to my site. But I’m hoping that this can somehow be rectified, and I’ll stay on it.)

Dick spent one career in government service as an intelligence officer, a position for which he is supremely qualified on account of him being the smartest person I know, as well as probably the best informed. He also used to write and edit some of the historical series of Time-Life Books. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been doing analyst and editing work for government agencies through contractors.

(When I say “the smartest person I know”, you should understand this is not hyperbole. He’s also one of the most precise and eloquent writers. So I have to say that what Autocorrect has done to his emails from the hospital is so cherce, I’m saving them; I think I can build an epistolary novel out of them.)

Back BB (Before Blog) when I used to email some friends links to the WSJ’s Eric Felten’s columns on various kinds of booze, I’d sometimes get replies from Dick mentioning the likes of Sunday brunches at the French officer’s club in Saigon, or gin and tonics at the British embassy in Lagos. These bagatelles (to him) hinted of a very exotic life, and I really wished I could hear more of it.

Over the years I’ve also picked up tidbits of how decisions were made during various geopolitical crises of the the last half of the 20^th century. For me it's like reading Lincoln's letters, only without the really bad handwriting and the microfilm.

And through Dick I’ve “met” more smart and interesting people who expand my understanding on a whole range of topics. Many of them come from a military and/or intelligence background, and they keep me on my toes.

(Some of us were preparing a Delta Force-type mission to break him out of the hospital until he reported that it looked like he was going to get out through the front door. Pity, though, as I was kind of looking forward to personally taking out the stout Frau SS Quartermaster who kept hounding him about the crutches.)

One of Dick’s passions is singing. I think he’s given up the Washington Chorale, but he is crazy-mad for the Washington Revels. This production means that in the run-up to Christmas you’re not going to get much of Dick’s attention, what with rehearsals and performances, but lordy, does he have fun.

This year their theme is Irish, and I really hope Dick used “Eileen Aroon” for one of his audition pieces. His voice is just exactly right for that. I think the decisions have been made for this production, and my fingers are crossed that Dick made the cut. But at the very least, I want to see the video that he submitted for the audition.

Every year or so, Dick and Carolun take an extended trip—four to six weeks. Carolun plans it with the attention to detail that was exhibited in the Normandy landings 70 years ago, only with all the advantages of the Interwebs. I’m talking 30-page itineraries with precision-timed schedules, bus routes, restaurant reservations and alternatives in the event of Acts of God (which got a bit of a workout this time out). The one last year was to Japan; previous treks have included Britain, France, Italy and Peru.

I love these trips and I love the schedules. They show such zest in the planning and execution, that it’s almost like I’m going along. I save the itineraries, because in the event that I ever get to take a holiday again, I’m going to piggy-back on all this research. I only wish Dick was better at de-briefing after the trips, because I always want to know their take on the places they visited, but he balances a lot of activities and trip reports lose out.

Just before he and Carolun left on their journey this time, Dick said he thought he might finally have found someone who can do his job with the accuracy and detail that he gives it, so he’s making very serious retirement noises.

You know—second-career retirement.

Well, hurrah! Because he cannot get started on his memoirs fast enough for me. All of those agency postings, all that hum-int/sig-int analysis, all those cocktails—I want the full scoop.

A few weeks ago something happened to his PC hard drive, and he had to leave it with the repair people for a week. That hard drive has the notes for his memoirs on it, and I’m afraid I got a little edgy with him when I begged him to assure me that he’s backed all of this stuff up to the Cloud. Or at least to an external drive. Jump drive? Please? (Note to self: get edgy again when he returns, to make sure this is happening.)

In the meantime, I am honored, privileged and so grateful to have been one of Dick’s many friends for these past couple of decades. My life would have had a lot less color and music in it without him.

And I want him writing those bloody memoirs!