If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, then what follows here today just might be the single-most sincere thing I have ever done or written. I wrote this on this very sad anniversary last year, which was the tenth anniversary of the tragic death of the gentle giant, Stuart Solomon.
Em and Stu
(1985 Tempora et Mores)
"Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
Grab hold of a hot pan,
second can seem like an hour.
Put your hands on a hot woman,
an hour can seem like a second.
It's all relative."
- Preacher (LL Cool J)
"Deep Blue Sea"
If a sentiment expressed by a fictional character in a scene from a twenty-year-old homage to/ripoff of Jaws offends your sensibilities - and seeing as we live in the era of Faux Outrage it just might, then consider it this way. It was ten years ago today that Stuart Solomon, forty-one-years young, died. Whether for you this past decade passed in an eye blink or in an eternity, one truth remains inviolate. Stu died before these past ten years happened. He did not experience a single moment of it. Not one.
I had just begun what proved to be an ill-considered and (mercifully) brief adventure plying my trade somewhere other than the Firm when Bowinkle called me to tell me the terribly sad news about Stu. It was a Thursday morning. Mark and I have been friends for as long as I can remember - and likely longer than he wishes he could remember - during which time we have conducted a total of a couple of hundred phone conversations in an aggregate time of less than ten minutes. Our conversation that morning might have been the longest one we have ever had - not because of what we said to one another but because of the prolonged silences that filled the void between the staccato bursts of conversation.
As a kid, certainly through high school and most likely through college, I believed fervently in my own immortality. Survive a single-car accident with nary an injury (no broken bones, no lost limbs, and no cuts that required stitches) in which the car you are/were/had been driving bounces nose-first into a drainage ditch, rolls over (side-to-side) two times, and comes to rest upside down on the side of a deserted country road at shortly after midnight and tell me just how high you would crank your "I AM BULLETPROOF"dial. To a lesser degree, albeit only slightly lesser, I believed in the immortality of my friends too. We were too young to die, a rule whose exception was proven tragically by Brian Clare, a gentle soul to whom the world - if it operated on the premise of fundamental fairness - owed a significantly better fate than that which he received.
Being an anti-sentimentalist, when people who had spent five-plus days a week together for anywhere from four to ten years outgrew the sobriquet "Classmates", I reasonably anticipated that growth for each of us would be both upward and outward and that the farther removed we were from our status as the "Class of '85", so too would we be farther and farther removed from each other. Speaking for myself that is indeed what happened. With a couple of notable exceptions, I had little contact with any of my high school classmates once high school was in the rear-view mirror.
Stu was one of the notable exceptions, at least through college and a year or two thereafter. Once I started dating Margaret in June, 1991, and thereafter started law school in September, 1991, my life's trajectory had reoriented itself in a very specific and particular way. I wrote those words just now with the same amount of regret I felt when I lived through those days almost thirty years ago, which is to say none at all. Life is a forward-moving exercise.
I cannot recall when I had last seen Stu but I do remember where it was I last saw him. He and his father, Roger, had opened a sports bar, neither the name of which nor the location of which I ever committed to my memory. On its opening weekend, I joined Mark and several of Stu's long-time friends there to wish Stu luck on his new venture, about which he was justifiably excited. Leaving that night, I remember telling him that I would be back.
I never made a second visit.
Not too terribly long after it opened, the bar was gutted in a fire that raged through the strip mall in which it was located, a fire that started in one of the strip mall's other tenants. To my knowledge, Stu and his dad never attempted to reopen it, either in its original location or elsewhere.
Forty-one is too damn young to die. Yet, it was at precisely that age that Stu died. Proof again of the inherently inequitable nature of Life. Proof, also, of the fact that time neither flies nor crawls. It simply marches on, grinding its way through its day-to-day. Through ours as well. Reminding us that immortality is a child's dream, the gossamer-like nature of which is revealed to each of us in the stark light of adulthood...
...but in which there is no harm in visiting upon every now and again if for no reason other than to remind us how to dream. Perhaps, to remind us also that it is OK to do so.
-AK
