Imma ignore the events—outrageous, ridiculous and pathetic—of
this week and give you the opening hymn from last Saturday’s memorial
service for my friend Dick.
This isn’t perhaps the most rousing rendition of “Guide Me,
O Though Great Redeemer”, but all the Welsh male choruses I heard just…didn’t
click with me, for some reason.
But Dick would definitely have enjoyed the purpose of this
setting—the service
marking the centenary of the establishment of the Royal Air Force, held in
Westminster Abbey in July, 2018.
You don’t get the full effect of the basses echoing the
refrain, but you should still crank it up and let it fill your space.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the Costco in Fairfax
instead of the one in Sterling. Dunno if that fact is relevant, but this is the
first time I’ve seen this product available in a Costco:
Actually, this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything
calling itself “chicken paws”. I once had chicken feet at a Chinese
restaurant in Milpitas. (They were delicious, but difficult to eat with
chopsticks. Slippery little buggers.) Actually—even “feet” is odd; technically
they’re claws.
I should have got a shot of the price, but fell down on the
job. Sorry.
I spent part of Saturday afternoon at the memorial service
for my friend Dick Kovar, one of the best exemplars of how to live a full life
I’ve ever known.
Dick died in June, at age 96. But it’s not just the number
of years that’s impressive, it’s that he and his wife Carolyn celebrated his 96th
birthday on Valentine’s Day with a romantic dinner at their favorite restaurant
in Vienna (Virginia), and there was a family Easter celebration six weeks
before his death at L’Auberge Chez François. He grasped life with a joyful zest
that radiated out to all around him.
I last wrote about Dick in 2015, so you can get
the basics there. (That was the occasion of the little kerfuffle at the
Dresden train station on his and Carolyn’s Mittel Europa tour, where he ended
up in hospital for about a week or so.) I was the transponder of his holiday
reports in the days before he got an iPad—he’d laboriously write out his daily thoughts
on his iPod and send them and photos to me; I’d transmit them on to an email
list of about 30 people. I loved those trips almost as much as if I’d taken
them myself.
(In fact, when I decided in 2018 to go to Prague,
Berlin and Paris, I stayed in hotels that had the Kovar seal of approval in
each city.)
Dick’s long career in public service is outlined in this
obituary—30 years at the CIA as an editor, analyst and other things. Postings
around the world—which I found out about in dribs and drabs as, for example, he’d
mention that the French officers club in Saigon had great champagne brunches,
or that he acquired his taste for gin and tonic at parties thrown by the
British embassy in Nigeria.
(Fun fact: the last few trips that Dick and Carolyn took
before Covid were to Italy. Naturally, they dined on wonderful meals, but there
was a problem with getting bartenders to make a proper, Kovar-quality martini;
they didn’t seem to understand the concept of dry vermouth. IIRC, he ended up
taking a flask of vermouth on the last trip or two so that he could enjoy his
pre-prandial cocktail fully.)
On the subject of booze, back in 2014 I posted some stats
on global drinking, where the US turned out to be somewhat…not on top in
terms of whiskey; India—while behind Ireland and the UK—was still a contender. When
Dick read it, he commented that when he visited an Indian military base one
time, his observation was that the officers could definitely put it away.
There’s one more anecdote I want to share. I may have mixed
up the specifics, but either way, it’s illustrative of the kind of world Dick
created around him. In an email (or possibly a Facebook post), Dick mentioned a
party he and his wife had thrown for the international community somewhere; in
the course of it, a guest—a Sikh—managed some expansive gesture (I can’t
recall). Dick’s elder daughter Elspeth corrected him: it wasn’t a Sikh, it was
a Gurkha, and he’d done a back flip over a terrace railing into the garden
below without spilling a drop of his drink.
Regardless of whether it was a Sikh or a Gurkha doing a dance move or a back flip—that’s what I call a party.
Dick was in the CIA across our involvement in Southeast
Asia, some of the periodic blowups in the Middle East, Central American
skullduggery and other sundry geopolitical hot times. I don’t know this, but I
assume he would have been right in the thick of it—his job at some point
entailed preparing and delivering the President’s Daily Brief (back in the days
before that had to be reduced to two bullet points and a cartoon). He took
early retirement in 1980, worked as an editor for Time-Life Books and
returned to the agency as a contractor/consultant. He did this in one form or
another until 2015, when he finally really retired, at age 86.
One story that encapsulates his career for me is his 1987
testimony at the trial when General William Westmoreland sued CBS for
defamation in a documentary the network aired about US forces in Vietnam under
counting enemy forces. Dick shed light on the ways governments can “reshape”
reality to conform to their preconceived notions—at the price of individual
integrity, citizen trust and thousands of lives. You should read WaPo’s report. (Dick at one point sent round
a paper about this, but I can’t find it.)
Throughout this, the continuo of Dick’s life was music,
both sacred and secular. I met him in the church choir, where he was the
linchpin of the bass-baritone section. But for decades his great musical joy
was performing in the annual Washington Revels at Christmas time. This WaPo story gives you a bit of the flavor of those performances.
Photo by Kate Patterson for WaPo
(There were about 20 Revelers at Dick’s memorial service;
they both sang and reminisced about the joy he added to their productions. He
was, it seems, a natural ham.) He loved Welsh hymns, and they permeated the
service on Saturday, starting with “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah”, to the
tune of “Cwm Rhondda”—one of the most majestic melodies ever, with a fabulous
bass echo, which Dick always relished when we sang it in church.
But Dick also had a deep, through-the-bone faith. We had a
couple of convos about that over the years; the resurrection and the life were
not in any respect theoretical to him, they existed as the alpha and the omega,
and so he was comfortable with the notion of death. Far from being something to
be dreaded or feared, it’s just the threshold to the next life, so why not step
through it with the same anticipation that you experience when you go from the
kitchen to the living room on Christmas Day? (My paraphrase.)
In this vein, Dick was endlessly curious about near death
experiences. He would send round accounts of the experiences people who’ve been
clinically dead and restored to life report. The white light, the benevolent
welcome. But I don’t think he needed them as proof—he already knew.
The last time I spoke with Dick in person was in 2023. I
think that was the only time I’ve ever seen him not wearing a tie—it was a very
nice polo shirt, buttoned to the top, under a sport coat. Most of our
relationship since choir days (which was in the last century) was via email and
Facebook. I’m sorry about that, but I’m also cognizant of that fact that
writing, to him, was his element, just like music was; I didn’t get to hear the
voice, but I definitely got the spirit.
On the subject of writing—I ragged on Dick for years
to write his memoirs. I don’t know if he did, or even if there’s just an
outline or a draft or a collection of anecdotes; I hope to God there is,
because—in whatever form or condition—it is pure gold.
So I’m grateful for the decades of exchanges, jokes, minor
tech crises, travel reports, links to Katherine Jenkins videos and everything
else Dick gave me. When I heard the news of his death, my first response was, “Oh,
no. No.” My second—almost immediately—was, “What an amazing, spectacular life,
and thank you for gracing mine with your friendship.”
I’ll leave you with two things. The first is a letter from
Fra Giovanni Giacondo (a Dominican and then Franciscan priest, architect and
archaeologist) to his friend, Contessina Allagia degli Aldobrandeschi, on
Christmas Eve, 1515. (There’s historical dispute about the authorship of this,
but it’s immaterial to the present discussion.) Dick read this version at his younger daughter Carrie’s wedding:
“I salute you. There is nothing I can give you which you
have not. But there is much that, while I cannot give, you can take. No heaven
can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven! No peace
lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take peace! The
gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy.
Take joy!
“And so I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and
forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.”
And I cannot write about Dick without music. “It Is Well
with my Soul” was not part of Saturday’s service, but I just feel that it’s
right. So here’s the Jehovah Shalom Acapella group of Uganda singing it. They’ve
got a good bass singer anchoring it.
Oh—Saturday evening, I made a little toast to Dick. Not a martini—I don't like gin and I've reached the point in my life where I have to spend my alcohol calories wisely, so I don't drink anything I don't like. So I had a little slurp of Highland Park 12. Sláinte mbaith, Dick.
