An Interruption – A Major Disruption

This isn’t the post I had planned on publishing next, but Mike died last night.

Who was Mike?

That’s easy, but it’s also complicated.

Mike was a salesman, and all the things you expect a salesperson to be. Outgoing, to the point of in-your-face at times; knows everybody; slickly dressed; used to drive a flashy Jaguar (which seemed to spend more time in the shop than it did on the road!); not always the favorite person of the Facilities Managers that had to deal with him; always handing out doodads to promote his business; always smiling.

This is one of the early doodads Mike was handing out in the 80's or early 90's, and it still lives in our key lock-box 

Everything that I'm not, yet Mike was also my friend.

We first encountered each other 40 some-odd years ago when I was the keeper/maintainer/repairer of complex computer systems and he was selling the UPS (Un-Interruptible Power) systems that made sure those computers always had clean, steady power, even when the grid went down.

Our relationship started out on a technical basis, and I am good at that, but gradually we morphed into something more. At least I think we did but I’m really bad at this friend thing so maybe I’m deluding myself.

We both wrapped up our careers at roughly the same time. By then I was the one designing the data centers, defining requirements, reviewing bids, pulling the trigger on purchases, and overseeing the installation and startup. Mike was still flogging UPS solutions.

But Mike was more than just a typical salesperson. I have, never once, been visited by the salesperson that sold me a new vehicle, or the one that sold me the humidification system or the fire suppression system in one of my data-centers. On the other hand Mike, often to the dismay of facilities managers until I told them to back off because he was providing a valuable service, could often be found wandering the dark, back-room nooks and crannies of the facility checking on the health of the systems he had sold, checking in with us to see if they were meeting expectations, and what our future expectations might be, reminding us when preventative maintenance service intervals were coming up and helping us contract with third-parties for those services.

But let’s get back to that ‘Mike was my friend’ statement.

To be honest, I’m not sure I really know how to be a friend.

As a ‘shy’ kid I had my cousins around but, though we lived in one of those kid-friendly 60’s subdivisions overrun with speeding bikes, shouting children trailing streams of bubbles from up-raised fists, or just running around manically, I can only remember one ‘playdate’ with a neighborhood kid, I think his name might have been Garret. Looking back on it now, he was also ‘shy’ and may have been autistic like me, but I didn’t know how to process that at the time. When I found afterwards that he had pooped, just a little, in my closet, I understood; knew first hand, the crippling fear of doing something so personal and outside the normal routine as using a strange bathroom, and I quietly cleaned up the mess without saying a word to anyone. But I didn’t have the skills to maintain a relationship, even with someone who might have been just like me, and that was the last time we got together.

I’ve often said that, other than my first wife, I can only remember three people from high-school, two of those were jocks that everybody knew, the third, Pat, was what passed for a ‘friend’ in my teenage life. Not enough so that we ‘hung out’ together, but enough so that he was my best man at my first wedding, and yes, we were both still teenagers at the time. But a few hours later my new bride and I were driving across the country to my next military posting and I never talked to Pat again. Until, somehow, we briefly reconnected well after both of our first marriages had fallen by the wayside. This had to be in the early 2000’s since I was driving the E350 Sportsmobile van at the time. Turns out we had a lot in common besides marrying and discarding our high-school sweethearts after a decade of trying to pretend. Growing up we shared the same community and school, we briefly competed on the tennis courts during PE. I took off for the military and followed a technical career path that let me focus on machines and not people. Pat followed in his father’s footsteps and became an MD, but rather than face the politics of hospital life or the hassles and long-term relationships of a private practice, he contracted with a small regional hospital as an ER doctor. Get them in, patch them up, either send them home or on to a trauma-center, andmoove on until it's timento punch out and go home. After a couple decades of going our own ways then a randome chance email encounter, we met up at the small cabin he had built deep in the woods at the end of a rough two-track driveway and sat out on the deck rather than in the combo kitchen/dining/living room. We both lived a quiet, purposeful life. We were both into writing, him published, me not, and creating art (his chimney was a soaring sculpture and the timbers of his cabin sported fancifully carved figures). But when he guided me back as I turned around in his tiny parking area and drove away that afternoon, it was the last time we spoke.

Yet somehow Mike and I, as different as we were, as different as our worlds were, connected.

I can’t really explain why.

Maybe, in part because we were both project people and that continued after our careers wrapped up. But while I hunkered down in our compound and specialized in building RV’s, furniture, knickknacks and the like, Mike and his wife specialized in moving all over the country, buying and selling, refurbishing and remodeling, and building houses.

When they were refurbishing an old frame house while building a boutique campground on the back of the property and a bespoke art gallery on the front only a couple dozen miles from our compound, I was often over there. Sometimes just getting a tour of the progress and update on the plans. Other times it was more than that. Like the time I dragged my surface plainer over there and set it up in the new RV barn next to the campground so that we could spend the better part of a day turning a big stack of rough-cut cedar into several really large trash bags of cedar shavings  and a pile of refined flooring for the balcony that looked down over the main gallery space.  

We frequently went for long periods without seeing, or even contacting, each other. Sometimes there was an excuse, like when they moved to Salida CO to built a house up on the side of a mountain during the COVID mess then quickly sold it (turns out it’s cold up there! And, like many small-ish towns, the people of Salida are not all that welcoming to outsiders, not a tolerable situation for Mike and his wife both.), other times there wasn’t, like when I ghosted him along with everyone else for two years as I dealt with cancer even though he only lived a couple hours away for much of that time.

Near the end of those two years Mike and his wife moved into yet another refurb job, an early 1900’s house with the all-important shop-building next to it, in a town less than twenty miles from our compound. By chance, or the intervention of whatever gods populate the universe, three or four weeks ago I went over to check out thier latest project and Mike and I sat around a work-table by the open overhead door of the shop and talked for several hours. As was our way, both about technical stuff as well as squishy stuff.  It was as if we had seen each other only last week and were picking up an ongoing conversation.

That, as it turned out, was our last visit together. A week or so later he wasn’t feeling good. Two weeks after that he died.

Sometimes we weren’t in touch all that often, and when getting a text from him after months of no contact, I might roll my eyes, figuring that he was contacting me because he needed some advice or a hint or two about a woodworking issue. But, even though contact may be sporadic, like Schrodinger’s cat, he was always there even though I couldn't see him. My friend. But last night someone opened the box, and now he’s dead, forever.

I’m not sure how good a friend I really was, or even if I truly know what a good friend is and how to be one, but in my world Mike was my only friend in the non-internet world.

I’m standing here this afternoon knowing it’s unlikely I’ll ever have another friend like him, and not quite sure what to do with myself as I’m trying to process this.