The other day, the HR department
at my workplace sent an all-staff email conveying the sad and shocking news
that a big name in our organization—the American Physical Therapy Association—and
in the physical therapy profession in general, had died in a car accident in
Costa Rica. He was a pugnacious former board member who tended to be a
polarizing figure. My friend Maryann, who left my workplace a few years ago but
used to cover a lot of board meetings and other association functions as a
writer and editor, first texted me, upon receiving the news, that this man had
been “loved and hated,” then corrected herself,
in a subsequent text, that “hated” had been too strong a word.
I knew what she meant. You
hate people who murder your relatives or force you to quit your job rather than
spend another day working for them. You don’t really hate people who are as
passionate about your profession as you are. You especially don’t hate them if
they’re more passionate about your
profession than you are.
My dealings with this guy had
been pretty limited. I’d interviewed him for articles a few times. What I remember
is that he answered my questions and responded to my emails, which is pretty
much everything I like in anyone I interview. What I don’t remember is anything I talked to him about. I have a lousy
memory in general, but it’s particularly bad when it comes to stuff I write about
for work. I’m all-in during the research, interviewing, outlining and writing process.
I work hard to ensure that my articles are accessible, useful and well-written.
But it’s my job, as opposed to my life. Which is why, once each story has been
put to bed—once it’s been published and my interaction with it is done—I forget
pretty much everything about it. I’m astonished sometimes when I reread a piece
I wrote just a year or two ago, sometimes favorably so and other times not. They
seem either far too smart for me to have written them, or, more rarely but quite
depressingly, far too careless.
Anyway, I checked back
yesterday on the tribute page my employer had set up for Mr Recently Deceased. There
were many, many tributes. I read for several minutes, then scrolled down to the
bottom to see how long that would take. I kept scrolling, and scrolling. For a
while it seemed like one of those deals on Yahoo News where you never get to
the end because it adds yesterday’s celebrity blurbs and disaster roundups,
then those of the day before that. (To the last syllable of recorded time, as
Shakespeare might have said of the bottomless nature of gossip about the Kardashians.)
Suffice it to say, this guy
was well loved by a whole lot his peers. And surely not hated by many. Not hate-hate, anyway. “That’s nice,” I
thought as I scanned the tributes. I’m on the fence about the afterlife, but I feel
pretty certain that the deceased aren’t sitting on a cloud somewhere reading
posthumous tributes through their Earth-vision goggles. I always find strange
those paid blurbs in the obituary section of the newspaper in which the
deceased is addressed directly by the family and assured how much he or she has
been missed by Mom and Uncle Fred over the course of the past two, five or 10 years. If there is an afterlife, how much of it is spent, I have to wonder, reading the small type at the back of the Metro section?
No, what I was thinking was,
that’s nice for the dead guy’s family, to know how highly people thought of
their son, brother, father, husband, whatever. I know nothing about this particular
dead man’s personal life. Maryann texted me something about there having been another
guy in the car, who was injured in the accident. She called that guy by his
first name, and clearly thought I’d recognize the name and know what his relationship
with the deceased had been. Had Mr Recently Deceased been gay, then? I hadn’t a
clue, and I couldn’t care less—except for the fact that it speaks well of APTA
if the guy felt comfortable being “out” as a board member and a prominent voice
of the profession.
Less than 24 hours after the email from HR, I received the news in an email on my home PC that my
favorite movie theater will be closing at the end of this month. That news hit me hard, even though the
only shocking thing about it was that the tiny, rather shabby triplex of
theaters near Georgetown had lasted for four and a half years in a competitive DC
marketplace that increasingly is offering bigger, flashier alternative venues
in which to view the kinds of quirky indie films, thoughtful foreign movies and
probing documentaries that have been West End Cinema’s stock in trade. The
short message from “Josh” on the email cited “business realities.” A subsequent
article in the Washington Post’s
Weekend section revealed his last name—Levin—and added a few quotes and details
about the “radical changes” in the “exhibition landscape” that had occurred
since the venue’s debut in the fall of 2010.
I loved going to West End and
had a whole routine around it. I knew where and when to park in Georgetown so
as not to get a ticket—most times. I always went to matinees—I hate crowded theaters—and
I liked walking past the fancy hotels along M Street NW to get to the theaters
at the corner of 23rd. It made me feel very cosmopolitan, somehow, even though
I was just passing through. One of the two same guys always was there, taking tickets
and serving popcorn and checking the heat in the dumpy boxlike spaces (more like
projection rooms than “theaters”). They were low-budget jacks of all trades. Josh must’ve been
one of them.. I never felt comfortable making
conversation with him or the other guy. But I like to think I was recognized,
and my patronage appreciated.
Most recently, I saw the wonderful
Belgian film Two Days, One Night
there, and some of the Oscar nominees for Best Short Film: Documentary. I almost
always came solo, but a few months ago Lynn accompanied me to a documentary
about a pioneer of yoga in the United States. Determined to see all eight best
picture nominees before last month’s academy awards, I saw several at West End.
It was a comfortable place. I
prefer sitting up close in theaters so I don’t have a sea of jabbering heads in
front of me. At West End, the screens were small enough that there was no danger
of my eyes getting lost in enlarged pixels. I sometimes sat in the very first
row.
The juxtaposition of these
two deaths—the board member’s and the theater’s—struck me immediately, and has
been on my mind for the past few days. For a roughly equal amount of time, I’ve
felt like I wanted to blog about it but have wondered what my “angle” should be.
I’m now nearing the end of this post without quite having come to a conclusion.
I in no way mean to minimize
the death of the board member—whose name, by the way, was Steve Levine, and who
no doubt was a great man in his professional sphere in additional to being a
comfort and joy to his intimates. I am
saying that I’ll miss West End way more than the frankly not at all that I’ll
miss Steve, but that is all context and is absolutely nothing personal. Part of
me thinks I ought to pay tribute to West End on its Facebook page, in the
manner that APTA members paid tribute to Steve on the associaton’s dedicated
page, except that I still think Facebook is a stupid time-suck and I refuse to
join it.
Perhaps this is trite, but if
there’s a common thread here, it’s that if someone or something truly touches
you, there’s never a good time to see it die. It’s always too soon, and it’s
always irreplaceable. All the more so if it’s pugnacious and if it seemed to delight
in fighting the good fight. Especially then.
