Enjoy This Life

One of my best friends, Bob Ward, passed away this week. He was only 60, which sounds old to a teenager but is way too young to die these days. He was diagnosed with mesothelemioma and given six months to three years to live in the summer of 2007. I learned about it in an e-mail he sent me on the last day of our family's Greek Islands cruise.

At first, Bob said he wished he didn't know he was dying, because he felt great but had trouble sleeping due to the diagnosis. His golf game was good, and he felt great. Rather than laying in a hospital bed while they poked around at him, he decided to carry on with life as normal as long as he could. He went on some amazing extended cruises with his loving wife Billie and on many shorter trips with his kids. I played golf with him at La Costa in November and he was still doing very well. He played a great round of golf, and no one looking at his smiling face and hearing his jokes would have guessed he was a dying man. Shortly thereafter, however, he turned down golf, telling me he wasn't sure he could hold onto his club while swinging. He said he really just wanted to spend time at home with his family.

Throughout our friendship, he was one of the happiest people I ever knew, and he truly loved everything in life. He was a fireman who loved his job. He called it a gentleman's club. He liked every aspect of the job, from cooking a meal when his turn came up about once a week to washing the fire truck to going out on a fire call. He said after all the years of being a fireman that he still got a charge out of riding through the streets with the red light flashing and the sirens blaring. I remember meeting him at La Mirada Golf Course in the morning after his fire house shift ended and asking how his day went. He gave his usual answer: "Oh, you know, watched a couple of movies, saved a few lives."

Like most parents, he loved his kids and bragged about them any time he had the chance, but he knew when to employ a little tough love. While attending college, his son came to Bob and said he'd decided to take a year off so he could go up to Mammoth and work on the ski patrol. Bob said, "Yeah, I think that should be a lot of fun. But understand that I'm planning to be done paying for your college when you've been out of high school for four years, so if you decide to take a year off, you'll be paying for your last year on your own." He said his son never brought it up again, and he went on to be a very successful businessman who treated Bob to some fun trips.

He also had grandchildren in his later years, and he lit up when he talked about them too. One of his favorite stories was about the younger one getting a smaller portion of something, though I can't remember what, and asking why she didn't get as much as her brother. Bob explained that was because her brother was bigger, and she thought about it quite a while before she replied, "Yeah, but he's not that much bigger."

He loved golf. In the late 1980s through early 1990s, he and I would play about once a week. We would always laugh a lot about different silly things. For a while, I remember he said that he thought we were improving until he realized we were just cheating more. Out went our policies of taking mulligans and playing out of bound shots from where they went out. We still managed to shoot around 90 and usually had a showdown on the last hole, frequently betting some fraction of a dollar on the outcome. When I moved down to San Diego, we only got together to golf once every year or two, but it was always like old times when we did. He continued playing regularly and at the end of his life regularly shot in the low 80s, which is very good for someone who keeps score correctly.

He loved gadgets, always buying the newest computer accessories and cell phones. He also loved cars and kept them all immaculate. He bought an expensive Mercedes sedan, though I don't remember the exact one, through one of those online dealers about the time of his diagnosis. When he got it, he realized that it didn't have the bluetooth hookup for a cell phone, but then couldn't quite bring himself to spend $3000 that it would have cost for the upgrade at that point when it would have cost only a few hundred to have included it on the purchase. He was disappointed about that, but also said that now Mercedes had a key that you didn't even have to take out of your pocket to start the car, over which we shared a big laugh when I said that as someone who for years owned cars with hand cranked windows instead of the electric ones everyone seemed to have that I could understand why it had become too much trouble to take his keys out of his pocket. He already had received his death sentence, but he joked that he only wished he outlived his warranty on the Mercedes so he could justfy buying another one with more gadgets on it.

This is, after all, a travel blog, so I must point out that Bob loved to travel, and he went all over the world with his wife, Billie, with whom he enjoyed a happy marriage. As a fireman, he found out he could earn extra money throughout his retirement if he learned to speak a second language, so he took up French, which I'm sure came in very handy in Los Angeles County. It did, however, give him an excuse to go to France for a month to study the language in full immersion. He returned without becoming fluent in the language, instead just telling me what filthy people the French are in his usual Will Rogers English.

That was actually Bob's second trip to France. On the first one, he and his wife joined Julie and me on a driving vacation through France and Germany in a rented Mercedes. Come to think of it, that might have been where he decided he need to get a Mercedes to supplement his mint condition Camaro Z-28 and red Toyota pick-up truck. After hearing how cheaply Julie and I had traveled through Europe going to B&Bs, he decided to have us show them the ropes. I don't think he and Billie were prepared for the pace at which Julie propelled us through Europe. There became some struggles between Billie and Julie about how to spend the time, and while Bob and I were generally happy to just be in Europe doing anything, Bob later told me that the pace was just too hectic for him. He said, "That was an amazing trip, and I probably saw more sites in a week than I would have seen in a month on my own, but I don't remember any of it."

Getting two rooms at little Bed & Breakfasts proved to be far more difficult than getting one, as Julie and I had on a previous trip to France, and we ended up in some pretty marginal places to sleep. Early on in the trip, Bob started talking about how much easier a cruise would have been for a vacation with friends, a lesson we definitely learned and reinforced over the years.

In Versailles, we decided to stay at the Hotel Ibis instead of a B&B. Julie and I went in to check to see if the cheap rates we heard about were true, and they were. We had left Bob and Billie driving around the block, because there was no place to park, but when we came out, Bob was standing in front of the parked Mercedes with his arms folded and smiling victoriously. He had something like six inches between him and the cars in front and behind him. I remember Julie took a picture of him, but I can't seem to find it right now. It didn't do justice to the moment anyway. We checked into the Ibis, and Billie re-named it the Hotel Abyss, because it seemed rather run down at that time. Julie and I nonetheless stayed there on a return trip a few years later, and a complete remodel made it rather nice by cheap Europe standards. Still, back then, I can remember the small elevator smelling like a homeless man who bathed in perfume, which was not really endearing to any of us.

For Bob and Billie, it seemed even worse. Bob was something of a clean freak. He could go out to play golf on a muddy course in white pants and stay clean all day, which was in stark contrast to me. I have to always wear dark colors sure to hide coffee spills. Once at my house I found him looking at the drapes to check for dust. He never made anyone feel uncortable about it, however. That was just who he was, and he knew everyone else was free to be who they were. Anyway, my point is that Bob truly loved life.

How ironic it is that someone who loved life so much should be called away so young?  However, as a paramedic in Vietnam, he could have died many times. He used to say that we never could have won that war, at least the way we fought it. He said he saw many good men die and be badly injured taking a stupid hill that they would be ordered to give up a week later and then to re-take again the next week. Maybe it was because he didn't die there that he chose to fully live every moment.

I've heard many people in my life talk about they will be happy one day when something happens, and perhaps not as many, but quite a few indeed, who've looked back and said they would be happy if only something had happened differently in the past. We all get the same number of minutes and hours in each day. That is what we have to work with and find ways to enjoy. We Americans are all so incredibly blessed to be living at this time in history and in this place, despite all of the screw ups from the past and what look to be certain in the future. We still have it better than kings and queens three hundred years ago when it comes to food, entertainment, shelter, transportation and medical care. The more I travel, the more I understand this reality.

It's not ideal right now, but throughout my lifetime, our American era has been much better than any time in the past and most other places in the world.