ACTUALLY I would not, though everybody seems to want to send them to me for some reason. Not the everybodies of my acquaintance, whose company I enjoy. It’s the commercial everybodies who want permission to push me around. I always say, no, I sincerely prefer that you don’t. So piss off.
The last three months scooted right by, did you notice? I already miss the snow, what little we had.
I took down some red maples in the woods behind the kids’ house on the west side of town. One was rotted at the base and leaning toward the garage, so that had to go.
And I finally got around to harvesting the stump of that big oak I’ve been bucking into rounds and splitting with an ax for years now. That was quite a tree. We got winters & winters of firewood out of it.
All from an acorn sprouted in the late 19th century.
This whole rack came out of the stump. It seemed a shame to let it rot away, which is what I had done for, I don’t know, it must be five years anyway.
It was a line tree way back when. Found wire in the center of it.
I felled its storm-damaged twin more than 30 years ago. Found wire in that one, too.
So that’s two big oaks down, we have only this one left now. Happily it’s the best tree the house came with when we bought it in ’86.
Here’s 14 seconds of me walking the saw around the stump.
Finished product: an oak dance floor for the groundhogs.
A navigation problem I was having off road has been resolved. Finally figured out what I was doing wrong in managing my GPX files.
Now I’m running the Garmin in tandem with the Gaia app on my old iPhone: so I’ve got a zoomed-out picture of the track on the Garmin and the zoomed-in view on the phone.
The latter follows my location via satellite, keeps me in the center of the screen. The Garmin won’t, hence its usefulness for the big picture only.
With this combination I was able to navigate the Rhode Island and Connecticut sections of a rural route to Vermont.
Rode it several times on cold winter days in February and March. It was fun to go ripping around in the dirt. It’s mostly third-gear stand-up riding.
In closing, because that’s the way he would want it, I’ll say a word about a friend of mine from Ohio, Chris Eck, who came to the end of his journey this week, on Wednesday. He was 56.
On my way to the Arctic in 2019 I stopped and saw Chris in Akron. He treated me to a wood-fired pizza in town, and good conversation. Terrific guy. A real gentleman. A gentle giant.
Chris was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer over the winter, in November. He thought it likely to make quick work of him. But when the disease initially responded to chemo he readjusted his view of the horizon and thought he might have at least a little time left to enjoy a Porsche he’d been lusting after. So he bought it.
He sent me this pic from the showroom.
The last time we corresponded, around the end of January, he was feeling as if things could go either way for him in the short term. He was private about it, hadn’t said anything on social media because he didn’t want his facebook page turning into a cancer blog.
Sharing it on FB means informing all of my co-workers, reporters I work with, people who will overreact with emotion and smothering, and lots of awkward exchanges, like 50 people from high school saying “You’ve got this!” just weeks before my obit runs.
About two weeks later, February 4, Chris had a change of heart and told his FB friends he had been diagnosed. He asked them not to write to him there but to be in touch privately if they wanted to.
Three weeks later he posted again, the briefest of follow-ups: “It’ll get me eventually but probably not this week. Thanks to all of you who reached out after my last update. I feel surrounded by love.”
Chris told me his diagnosis on January 24, after he read this update on my lymphoma. Though he always wanted the latest news on it, I was embarrassed that my mickey mouse situation was on his radar.
“What I’d give to say ‘see you in 90 days’ to any doctor,” he said.
Lest I give you the impression all we talked about was cancer, no, it was mostly cars, actually. Chris raced a Miata in recent years. He’d been into British racing in his youth, had piloted, among others, a red ’59 TR3 and a Bugeye Sprite. Little cars for a big man. He was hoping to get out on the track in July were he to live that long.
We did talk about wills, I remember that. About putting your assets in a trust. I did it years ago (the motorcycling, you know), Chris only recently. He got such a kick out of the fact that you can name your trust anything you like. He named his The Boating Accident Trust. I thought that was hilarious.
Chris lost quite a lot of weight over the course of his illness. Not a healthy loss; he called it a wasting. When he sent me this selfie in January he wrote, “I miss my chins.”
Because Ohio doesn’t list weight anymore on drivers licenses, Chris said he was going to add his new weight to his license with a sharpie. Funny guy, always. A real delight.
He ended the email thus:
And yes, please do share with Pam and I’ll keep you posted as we get closer to being “unable to tell the dancer from the dance.” Or perhaps farther away from it. Who knows what this looks like, but I hope to make fun of all of it, regardless of where it goes or ends.
It was Pam who told me Chris was gone. We didn’t know until a day after the fact, Thursday. One of his friends had posted it.
Chris was a good writer. Read his obit here, if you like. Anybody who knew Chris will have no doubt as to its authorship.
Live life out there today, all! As Chris liked to say, crediting Warren Zevon: “Enjoy every sandwich.”
Tony DePaul, April 27, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
