Nemesis

I met him in Savannah in 1990 or maybe 1991. He was a friend of my friend Jane, and I remember the three of us standing on a road in Daffin Park, near the minor league baseball stadium, one mild winter day, making small talk.

I instantly disliked him.

I was in my early 30s at the time, and he was some years younger. Six, it turns out, though I didn’t know that at the time. He seemed like an odd pairing with Jane, who was something of a hippie chick several years my senior. Jane wrote a freewheeling column about local people and places and curiosities for the newspaper that was my employer at the time. She was a bit of a celebrity. A big fish in a small pond in those pre-Midnight in the Garden of Eden days, when Savannah was a faded backwater that hadn’t gentrified and become a go-to tourist destination in the way that Charleston, just up the coast in South Carolina, had. Jane, a transplanted Jew and open-secret lesbian from Michigan who’d been an itinerant everything in way stations ranging from Chicago to Arkansas to Key West before opting to give journalism in the Old South a try, was a breath of fresh air, and she was locally beloved for that. In a town whose historic currency was gentility, she was messy, visually and psychically.

But this guy, her friend, seemed to me her antithesis, except in one way. He did activate my gaydar. Not that there’s anything at all wrong with being gay, but I’m mentioning that for a reason that I’ll share later. Otherwise, though, he struck me as the embodiment of entitlement. He was a Savannah native who’d attended private school. He was a preppy dresser. To my ears, he spoke with a practiced worldliness that suggested he was bored to be in my presence. I can’t remember if he was living in Savannah at the time or just visiting, whether he was in school or working. But he was a big talker. He’d traveled to places I’d never been, and clearly saw himself as a change-maker. He exuded a self-importance that fairly screamed, “One day you’ll remember you stood close enough to me to touch the hem of my garment, but you’ll be lucky if I remember you at all.”

I lived in Savannah for only three years, and I lost track of him. But then he popped back into my life at, of all places, a big DC party thrown in early 1993 to celebrate my recent marriage.  Lynn and I had met through Ken Johnson and Jo Joyce, a married couple who lived on Capitol Hill at the time. I’d moved to DC the preceding November, and Lynn and I had wed at a bed and breakfast in northern Virginia with only the innkeeper—a state-sanctioned celebrant—as a witness. Because we’d had no public wedding or reception, Ken and Jo opened their charming row house one Saturday evening to a hand-picked gathering of our friends. We hired a professional photographer to take photos. Ken and Jo laid out a beautiful spread. It was a magical night.

Mostly.

Except that, when I leaf through the photo album from that night, the guy from Savannah is in one of the shots. If you’re guessing I hadn’t invited him, you are correct. Someone I had invited—a woman I’d dated briefly in Savannah, who by then was living in Washington—had taken it upon herself to bring the guy from Savannah as her date for the evening. This despite the fact that the invitation had been clear—no kids, no dates, no significant others or anybody whose name didn’t appear on the envelope. I guess I’d known that my former date and the Savannah guy were friends, but I hadn’t known that he, too, had moved to DC, nor that she would be so rude as to assume the evening’s rules weren’t meant for her.

Anyway, the photo in our event album shows the two of them conversing with each other on a couch where they stationed themselves pretty much the entire evening. They presumably congratulated Lynn and me on our betrothal when they first walked through the door, but after that they might just as well have been sitting in an otherwise unpeopled coffee shop, except that all the refreshments were free.

While their presence hardly ruined the evening for us, our loathing of the Savannah guy remained very much on Lynn’s and my mind the only time we encountered him after that, at an art show at the National Building Museum. We happened to run into each other. I remember nothing of that brief conversation, but I’m quite certain he made no mention of having showed up uninvited at our party a few years earlier and then having ignored us and all the other guests while he and my one-time date tried their best to keep each other from being bored to death.

So, that might have been 1995 or 1996. Which means I haven’t seen the Savannah guy in the flesh in nearly 20 years. But he’s hardly disappeared from my life, as much I wish he would. Over the years since, he’s appeared at regular intervals when I’m reading book reviews or the bestsellers list. He’s been there when I open the Parade magazine in my Sunday newspaper. He shows up once a month to ruin my enjoyment of the New York Times’ Sunday Styles section, which I otherwise love for its lively lifestyles articles, evocative how-the-other-half-lives wedding announcements and witty “Social Qs” etiquette column.

Because his New York Times column, “This Life,” is monthly, in the weeks in between I get sort of used to not seeing his name, and I start hoping that maybe the “Old Gray Lady” finally has seen the error of her ways and has kicked his ass to the curb. But no such luck, ever. He’s a bestselling author, after all, with God knows how many Twitter followers and Facebook friends to hopefully attract youthful readers to an old-media dinosaur.

My most recent deflation came a couple of weeks ago, when I pulled out the Sunday Styles section to see, there on its front page, a column of his headlined, “The Stories That Bind Us.” As he typically does, he started off with a folksy, seemingly self-effacing anecdote from his own family life, then segued into a larger societal observation, citing the work of sociologists and researchers. This time his message was that the more children know about their family’s history, “the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believe their families function.”

Once again, he’d noted immediately that he’s a parent, and before the first paragraph was through he’d established that he’s both a martyr and an Everyman who’s been through what you, the reader, has been through, and who Feels Your Pain. Here’s the paragraph in its entirety:

"I hit the breaking point as a parent a few years ago. It was the week of my family’s extended gathering in August, and we were struggling with assorted crises. My parents were aging; my wife and I were straining under the chaos of young children; my sister was bracing to prepare her preteens for bullying, sex, and cyberstalking.”

Because I somehow can’t seem to just look away, I read the entire column, and I got even more agitated upon noting that he’d gotten the New York Times to pay him for recycled work. The piece had been adapted from his latest soon-to-be bestselling book, whose full, nauseatingly cutesy and pandering title is The Secrets of Happy Families: How to Improve Your Morning, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smart, Go Out and Play, and Much More.

I disgustedly threw down the newspaper and growled out his name, in much the same manner that Jerry Seinfeld once greeted his TV nemesis. But whereas the sitcom king spit out the word “Newman!” the six letters that left my mouth enunciated “Feiler!”

You might not know that name, but chances are you know his work. As his Web site boasts, immodestly but not—it pains me to admit—inaccurately—“Bruce Feiler is one of America’s most popular voices on family, faith and survival.” The bio continues,  “He is the author of five consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including Walking the Bible and The Council of Dads.” The former “describes his perilous, 10,000-mile journey retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert” and is one reason why he’s “one of the nation’s preeminent thinkers, writers and speakers about the role of religion in contemporary life.” The latter book, meanwhile, is “an international sensation” that “describes how, faced with one of life’s great challenges, he asked six friends to form a support group for his young daughters.”

The “great challenge” he faced in 2008, and ultimately beat, was cancer. His daughters are identical twins, born in 2005, who are named Eden and Tybee. Yes, pretentiously like the First Woman, and oh-so-preciously like the beloved island and beach area near Savannah. And of course Feiler, his wife and the twins live in trendy Brooklyn, where they no doubt count organic food shopping, rummaging through funky boutiques and playing hacky-sack with mimes and poets among their secrets of happy family life. (What? You think I’m editorializing?)

OK, let me pause here and get my caveats out of the way. I’ve already mentioned that I haven’t seen the guy in nearly 20 years. I don’t claim to truly know him. He’s undoubtedly worked hard for his success, and his books may, for all I know, be well-written and even insightful. (Full disclosure: I did read his very first published book, a chronicle of his year teaching English in Japan titled Learning to Bow, and was chagrined to find his prose to be rather skilled.) I’m even willing to concede that it’s possible Feiler didn’t fake cancer and pay off a bunch of doctors just so he could write a tear-jerking book about how he asked a half-dozen guys to help raise his daughters in the event of his cruelly premature death.

Anyway, as should be evident at this point, more than 1,500 words into this post, I’ve spent way too much time over the years thinking about and stewing over a guy who might not even be able to identify me in a lineup except for my memorable one-hand trait. More than once, I’ve asked myself why this is. Is it sour grapes, because he’s a best-selling author and international Name, while I’m a slothful once-a-month blogger who has only a handful of readers? Is it like the title of that Morrissey Song, “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful”—never mind that he and I never were friends? I honestly don’t think so, because I have a good life, I don’t crave the limelight, and at any rate, I really am lazy and would hate to feel compelled to work hard to produce books. Also, while I have this Holden Caulfield-like urge to pronounce Bruce Feiler a big phony, I don’t dispute the likelihood that his books have been meaningful to his readers. While, yes, I do passively begrudge him his success, I don’t actively do so.

What is it, then? Do I envy his dumb toothy grin, the extremely odd consistency of his hair, the drooling brats hanging off his arms in those treacly photographs? No, no and no.

Am I jealous of his world travels? OK, maybe a little bit. But, spending all that time in the scorching Middle East, checking out biblical shit? No thanks. Plus, with Lynn being such a homebody, I’d end up traveling alone a lot of time, and I’d greatly miss the woman I married for love rather than (maybe) for cover.

Really, it all comes down to the fact that I just don’t like the guy. Have I perchance made that clear? And I hate the fact that he nevertheless was at my post-wedding celebration, and that I can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without regularly being reminded of his outsized existence in the world. It’s as if he’s constantly baiting me, somehow. How will he tweak me next? Maybe he’ll start a syndicated column that the Washington Post will pick up, forcing me to read his stupid name in my local paper. Perhaps one of his daughters will grow up to, by some twist of fate, become my boss, and will somehow intuit my distaste for her dad, and will retaliate by making my working life hell.

Or maybe next time he'll allegedly overcome malaria, or a flesh-eating virus, with another bestselling epilogue to the story. I can envision my face reddening as I read the sales figures, and I can hear a single, loathsome word escape my mouth: “Feiler!”

   

I Can Pee For Miles

I owe my ability to urinate in public restrooms to The Who.

It’s true. When I was much younger, two of my least favorite things about attending arena-rock concerts were the assumption that I must have joints to share because I had long hair, and the presumption that I could just pee and get out of the way with a long line of guys waiting for my spot at the urinal.

The joint thing mostly ended when I finally cut my shoulder-length locks sometime during college, therefore no longer visually misrepresenting myself as a guy who even knew how to inhale, let alone as the kind of pharmaceutical sophisticate who recognized the street slang for all manner of other illegal narcotics.

Then, on July 13, 1980, 10 days past my 22nd birthday, I was standing in a long line outside the Greensboro (NC) Coliseum, mostly psyched to be seeing my favorite rock band for the second time. (Though The Who's manically brilliant drummer, Keith Moon, had gotten his seeming death wish by overdose two years earlier, and had been replaced by Kenney Jones.) But I also was feeling more than a little nervous about the bathroom situation, given my serious case of Shy Bladder Syndrome.

I’d devised various strategies over the years to answer nature’s call, in such situations, somewhere other than in my jeans. Sometimes I’d simply seek the privacy of a stall. Other times I limited my beer intake, hoping I might avoid altogether the need to go. (That never worked, because then and now, I likely could shun all beverages for 24 hours and still need to drain at least hourly.) Like that old joke about voting in Chicago, I tried going early and often, while the concert or sports-event crowd still was arriving. (Front-loading,—or, rather, front unloading—I discovered, had limited value. And sometimes, as during The Who’s 1976 American tour, when warm-up act Toots & the Maytals was getting booed off the stage in those not-ready-for-reggae times, the bathrooms could get pretty packed even after the music had started.)

Youth is fraught with enough frustrations—untamable acne, unattainable women, etc—without the ultimate, ridiculous frustration of simultaneously needing to pee like a racehorse and being reined in by the psychological pressure of all the guys behind you awaiting your place at the porcelain. I would try closing my eyes and envisioning myself alone—not that easy a task amongst shouts of “Daltrey’s a god!” and “Puke somewhere else, asshole!” I felt as if all eyes were on me as I lingered there, even though the guys with whom I’d been waiting in line already had conducted their business at one of the other urinals and moved on.

In time, I usually could break through the dam, if not always completely empty the reservoir. Sometimes, though, I’d have to zip up and move over to the line for the stalls—where privacy was assured, but often at the cost of unspeakable sights and smells.

All that was to change, however, on that fateful July night. Eight months earlier, 11 Who fans had died of “compressive asphyxia” in Cincinnati—trampled to death in a mad rush for the doors. Many venues—including the scene of the tragedy, Riverfront Stadium—abandoned unassigned seating after that. I can’t remember if I had an assigned seat for the 1980 Who show in Greensboro, or, if not, why thousands of us had elected to stand on line outside the doors. Regardless—whether in tribute to this new round of dead kids in O-hi-o, or because assigned seating had removed any incentive to storm the gates, or simply because “Greensboring,” as we young wits used to call it, never was big on drama—the crowd was orderly and patient.

God knows what was on my mind as I waited to get into the building. I’d started my first job out of college, as Davidson County reporter for the High Point Enterprise, only a couple of months before, so I likely was wondering how soon people would realize I was an idiot and I would be fired. Maybe I was thinking about how much I disliked both the clueless Ronald Reagan and the ineffectual yet strangely haughty President Carter, and whether I might rather go third-party with John Anderson in the November balloting. But most likely, as I stood there I was hoping the band would sample liberally from Tommy and Quadrophenia, and I also was praying I wouldn’t need to pee anytime soon, an hour or more before the doors were to open.

At some point, though, I was roused from my internal monologue by the whoops and hollers of my queue-mates, who were tapping each other on the shoulder and pointing to three guys who were—no, were they really?—urinating in near-synchronous yellow arcs against the venue we were about to enter.

Granted, I’d lived a pretty sheltered life to that point, but I’d never seen anything like this. I honestly don’t remember what the Tinkling Trio looked like—whether they were short or tall, shaggy or trim, T-shirted or tank-topped—but what I do starkly, searingly recall, to this day, is how much they cared what anyone thought about their performance, which was not one iota of a damn. They had to go, so they went. Period. If that meant whipping their johnsons out in front of hundreds of strangers of both sexes, defacing municipal property, and risking a misdemeanor if spotted by law enforcement, so be it. Relief was its own reward.

As it happened, there were no repercussions. Except, that is, for the game-changing impact on me. Ever since that day, whenever I stand facing a urinal in a rock club or sports-stadium restroom, all I need do if I start to freeze is invoke the words “Who concert 1980”—sometimes I even say it aloud—and picture those three glorious, disgusting guys darkening the bricks outside the Greensboro Coliseum with their devil-may-care whiz. “If they could do that,” goes my internal mantra, “I can do this.” There have been very few times over the years when that hasn’t worked. (At such times, it’s back to the stalls.)

So, all right, I really owe my ability to pee in public restrooms to those three anonymous young men who never will know what their appallingly crude display meant to me. Still, neither they nor I would’ve been at the Greensboro Coliseum in the first place on that summer day 33 years ago had it not been for The Who. A band that, it should be noted, had selected as the cover of its 1971 LP Who’s Next a photo of the quartet zipping their trousers after evidently having just marked their territory, so to speak, on a concrete monolith in the middle of a slag heap.

Interesting, too, is this bit of back story from a Google search on the making of that album:

“According to photographer Ethan Russell, most of the [band] members were unable to urinate, so rainwater was tipped from an empty film canister to achieve the desired effect.”

Is it any wonder why I’ve always felt such an affinity for that band?

Him Again

Check out the Wikipedia page for “Eric Ries” and here, in part, is what you’ll read:

“Ries is widely recognized as a ‘Silicon Valley guru,’ and his blog posts, entrepreneurial advice, and books are frequently featured in world news publications such as Reuters, CNBC, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, The New York Times, Inc magazine, Forbes, and Wired. He has also hosted several sold-out conferences, and advises the Lean Startup Machine workshop series, now in over 20 cities.”

If you think that doesn’t sound quite like the obscure, decidedly low-tech blogger whose words you’re reading right now—the guy who’s not once been featured in any “world news publications” and hasn’t even, in fact, gotten around to posting anything in this lonely space in nearly a month—well, kudos on the detective work, Sherlock.

The fact is, while I’m home sick from work today with a cold and am decidedly not taking advantage of this opportunity to tweet my nonexistent entrepreneurial insights or send texts to my nonexistent network of business contacts, the other Eric Ries likely is spending today lecturing to packed halls of rapt acolytes, preparing new bestsellers for publication and patching into conference calls from first class as he jets between major cities.  

Does the description “The Dynamic Doppelganger” ring a bell? Probably not, because even if you’re one of the handful (and I do mean handful) of faithful readers who’s been visiting this site since its inception a few years back, this Eric Ries’s writings clearly haven’t the resonance of the other one’s. But anyway, on September 10, 2010, in a post on this site headlined “The Dynamic Doppelganger,” I wrote about the other Eric Ries’s complete and utter domination of our Web presence. I’d appeared just once in the first 400 Google searches, at number 359, I wrote at the time—and that was for an article I’d written for an employer’s publication way back in 1999.

I shudder to think how far down in a Google search I’d finally appear now, and I’ve no frankly interest in finding out. Silicon Valley Eric Ries's star has only brightened in the nearly two and a half years since my post, while my obscurity has been quite steady. In fact, the younger Ries (born in 1979, according to Wikipedia) even invaded my physical territory not long ago, giving a talk at nearby George Mason University. And apparently he’s intensified his marketing efforts, too, because a couple of different work colleagues of my mine recently received unsolicited mass e-mails from him. In both of those cases, the recipient asked me if I knew that I share a name with a guy who couldn’t be much less like me. I responded by e-mailing them the link to my blog post, which I'd considered to be a minor masterpiece of self-effacing outrage.

Surely, I thought, the response would be, “Entrepreneurial Eric Ries may be rich and famous, but you’re hilarious!” They might also note, I smugly imagined, that I’m a better writer. And, should they be curious enough to watch one of my namesake’s many YouTube videos, they 'd perhaps even opine that I’m better-looking.

What happened, however, was exactly nothing. No response at all. No, “Great post!” Not even, “Ha!” What was I to draw from the silence? Was this an echo of the saying, “Those who can’t do, teach”—only, “Those who have no talent or drive, sadly snark about those who do”? Talk about deflating.

I’ve tried a couple of times to engage the other Eric Ries in dialogue. I found an e-mail address for him and sent him the “Dynamic Doppelganger” post. When I heard nothing, about a year later I tried again. While I don’t remember precisely what I wrote I either case, in my own mind I was so charming that he couldn’t help but respond—whether to thank me for a good chuckle or, more self-importantly, to offer me entrepreneurial tips for raising my Web profile. But I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that he had better things to do. You don’t build a publishing and public-speaking empire, after all, by taking time out to engage every gnat that buzzes by your ear.

I’ll confess, anyway, that the only reason I wanted the other Eric Ries to respond was because I figured that I could readily fashion another blog post from his reply. It’d be easy to simply riff off of his reply. “Easy” being as important a word in my lexicon as “enterprising” no doubt is in his.

See, just because the other Eric Ries’s ubiquitousness gets under my skin doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that he has no doubt worked hard for his success, and that I lack not only his talents, but his interests and motivations, too. That’s why I’m sitting here snuffling and clearing my throat in my smelly pajamas at mid-day, while nevertheless rather enjoying my obscure little life, at the same time that the other Eric Ries is looking all put together and engaging appreciative audiences or sharing his insights on CNBC.

Well, let him go out and beat the world, I say. Right now there’s a couch that’s calling my name.

Sunset At Springhouse

The cliché is that the new year is a time of renewal, but an ending is on my mind this week. A few months ago I concluded a 12-year run visiting residents of Springhouse of Westwood, an assisted living facility about a five-minute drive from my house.

One of the questions on last month’s Abbott-Ries holiday quiz noted the end of this particular era, and I chronicled in a previous blog post how I came to start spending an hour or two at Springhouse most Mondays nights for more than a decade. Briefly, I’d been looking for a volunteering opportunity. I proposed watching Jeopardy! with whoever was in the TV area at 7:30 and jawing with those “night owls” until 9 pm or so. I ended up forming some nice friendships. I outlasted a few waves of very old women (and a couple of guys). Then, finally, I stopped when the last wave ebbed to permanent high tide.

It was time for me to go, anyway. When I started visiting Springhouse in 2000, assisted living was, as the term suggests, a place for relatively healthy but frail seniors to live somewhat independently, albeit it with the assistance of trained onsite care staff. By the time I left, however, the living was muddled and circumscribed, the assistance intensive. Many if not most residents now are somewhere in the throes of dementia or Alzheimer’s and require the watchful eyes and helpful hands of private aides employed by their families. With the last of my friends now gone, were I to show up at 7:30 on a future Monday night, there might be at most two or three residents snoozing in their wheelchairs in front of the TV. Were they even to wake and exchange greetings with me, back-and-forth conversation would not follow, and they would not remember me the next week.

But, enough background. What I want to do today is devote a paragraph or so to each of my most memorable lost Springhouse friends. I wish you could’ve met them, because they all were enriching in some way. I don’t know what any of them were like in their prime of life. By the time I knew them, their health, memories, and, in most cases, spirits all were on a downward slope. Still, we enjoyed each other’s company, shared some laughs, staved off mortality with banter. That may not be much in the wide scheme of things. But it’s not nothing.

Marianthe Mellonas, who wore her heritage like a queen’s raiment, called herself the Greek Ambassador. She and her late husband had owned a restaurant near Georgetown. (Guess which cuisine.) She was eulogized at St Sophia, the sprawling Greek Orthodox church on Embassy Row, for her tireless fundraising decades earlier that literally had helped get that structure off the ground. She was big-hearted, but she loathed at least two people in the world: then-president George W Bush, who she dismissed as a “big dummy,” and Springhouse’s other alpha female of her era, the sometimes-imperious Augusta Hixon.

Augusta, for her part, generally referred to Mrs Mellonas—it would have bucked diplomatic protocol to have addressed the Greek Ambassador by her first name –as “that woman.” As in, “I don’t understand what that woman’s problem is! I’m always sociable with her!” Well, she wasn’t really. But it’s also true that civility toward Augusta did seem Greek to Mrs Mellonas. Those two were like oil and vinegar. Augusta was a piece of work. She was interesting, opinionated, meticulous about her appearance, loved her family, and seemed determined never to fall into disrepair. Indeed, when her end ultimately came, well into her 90s, it was fast. There was no slide. Just a quick plummet.

Phyllis Lynn and her late husband had raised their three boys in an attractive but not showy house off Massachusetts Avenue, near the District line, and had educated them all at the exclusive St Albans School on the National Cathedral grounds. There was nothing patrician about the woman I knew, though. She told me her friends always had called her “Philly.” Somehow I always could make her laugh, and her laughter was full-throated and joyous. After her memorial service at the St Albans Chapel, one of her middle-aged “boys” told me she’d said more than once, “If I had another son, I’d want him to be just like Eric.” He frankly sounded more threatened than complimentary when he told me, as if he feared I’d be named sole beneficiary in her will. But the tribute warms me to this day, even if though I feel I did little to earn it. Philly didn’t know the half of me. But I’m glad the part she did know pleased her so much.

Jeanne Davis had served as Rachel Carson’s executive assistant when the latter was researching and writing Silent Spring, the 1962 book that is credited by many with having kick-started the modern environmental movement. Jeanne loved poetry and literature and flowers and the vacation home on the St Lawrence River where her family gathered annually. She even invited me there once, but as it turned out she’d made her own last visit by then. Her beloved son Burnie later moved her to a nice facility in Charlottesville after he got a job in administration at the University of Virginia. I visited her there a couple of times. On both occasions she greeted me warmly and treated me as a friend, even though by then she had no recollection I’d actually been one.

Ruth Monk was that rare Springhouser who would join me in talking back to the TV during Jeopardy! “Ruthie is smart!” Mrs Mellonas often exclaimed. And she was. But she scoffed at that notion, characterizing herself as a simple housewife from “Missoura.” Her daughter had been a prominent US Attorney during the Clinton administration whose name often was the news. But when I met her for the first time in a funeral home chapel in northern Virginia, she seemed exactly her unassuming mother’s child. Ruth was 91 when she died, having lived at Springhouse an astounding 13 years and having never, seemingly, had a bad day or complaint in the world.

Ralph Patton was in a wheelchair and greatly debilitated by Parkinson’s disease by the time I met him. Still, he always enjoyed showing me scrapbooks of articles and clipping related to his evasion of German forces during World War II with the help of the French resistance after his Air Force plane was shot down. Ralph gave me a video titled Evade, in which he and other men who had survived similar perils discuss their wartime experiences against a backdrop of historical footage. In the video, Ralph appears as a coal company executive of perhaps 60. I’d asked him once about a rival coal company whose shoddy safety record had provoked a recent mine tragedy. “They always were the worst,” he said, in the same tone I imagined he'd once spit out the word “Nazis.”

I no longer remember Richard’s last name, and I wouldn’t share it here anyway, for a reason that’s about to become obvious. Richard, in a word, was a drunk. A charming drunk—a raconteur and ladies man—but a drunk nonetheless. I heard stories of run-ins with staff and confiscated flasks, but somehow his breath remained the same throughout our acquaintance. Inebriation seemed to agree with him, until his liver, inevitably, gave out. Richard always was in a good mood. I met his daughter during his final hospital stay, at Sibley in DC. She spoke of him in a shrugging, “What’re ya gonna do?” way as he lay there sleeping. She said he’d been a good dad on balance. Even if his balance often was unsteady.

I knew two Goldes at Springhouse. Both were Jewish, as the name suggests, but Golde Mullen had been married to an Irish-American who’d played in the National Basketball Association way back when it was as white as it is black today. She missed San Francisco, her longtime home where she’d feasted on a steady diet of adult education at a school to which I later would send a memorial donation. She was determined to keep her mind active, but she bemoaned all the New Yorker articles she’d just read and already couldn’t recount. Golde Kaufman, meanwhile, loved recalling her married life in rural Pennsylvania. She was warmed by visits from her husband, Morris, who lived independently nearby and still drove. I ran into him a few times at Golde’s last residence, a nursing home where I also got to know one of her neighbors—a very chatty legless woman.

My triumvirate of friends in the final Springhouse years were Sylvia Friedman, Mildred Levin and Helen Shaffer. Sylvia was quite feeble and could barely see or hear, but her hearty appetite impressed even the dyspeptic Mildred, who wasn’t impressed by much. Strangely, the near-blind Sylvia always knew when I was picking the scab on my leg, and told me to knock it off. Besides food, she loved hearing about our pets. Her son Frank used to call her from Philadelphia every evening, and her daughter Esther, who lived locally, doted on her. Like Phyllis Lynn, Sylvia really liked to laugh, and the cornier my jokes, the better. Lynn and I very much enjoyed talking with Esther at Springhouse holiday gatherings. I never met Frank, but he sounded like a very kind man when I occasionally picked up his mother’s ringing telephone.

Mildred and Helen were best buddies, perhaps because they complemented each other in their utter dissimilarity. Helen was as sunny as Mildred was cloudy. Helen’s eyes lit up when she ate chocolate, reminisced about learning to dance at Arthur Murray with her late husband, or so much as thought about corn on the cob. As a young, not-yet-married woman, she’d played country music on local radio in her family’s band. Seventy years later, she still spoke with pride and awe about the fact that she’d once signed autographs for bona fide fans.

While Helen might at some point have sung the tune “Keep on the Sunny Side,” Mildred’s outlook was antithetical to that sentiment. In Mildred’s world, most everything about today stunk. Yesterday always had looked better. Except, of course, that if you’d have caught her yesterday, that would’ve been the offending day (week, year, decade). She’d never married and seemed to have no friends besides Helen and Helen’s daughter Carolyn. The farthest Mildred ever had traveled was to California, but she hadn’t liked it much. Ditto Florida. She’d had an office job in Philadelphia that was OK, but everything since retirement had been pretty awful. Springhouse was the worst. Her doctors were useless. I couldn’t even start to talk about our cats without Mildred blurting, “I don’t like cats.” Her sister had lived up the hall at Springhouse, but predeceased her. Mildred couldn’t for the life of her understand why her niece wasn’t getting Springhouse shut down for a litany of alleged infractions.

In the early days of our friendship, I made the mistake of trying to cheer up Mildred, which was useless, and sometimes defending her targets, which was pointless. But once I realized that my optimal role was simply to commiserate—to tsk, sigh and resignedly shake my head at all the right times—my value to Mildred soared. She never exactly seemed glad to see me when I first arrived in the evening, but by the time we parted each Monday night she unfailingly thanked me for coming, wished me a good week, and asked to give Lynn her regards. Sometimes the greatest kindness you can pay someone, Mildred taught me, is to be his or her ally in bleakness. For some people, it turns out that, misery genuinely does love company.

The last time I saw Mildred was the millionth time she’d complained bitterly, “This place is going downhill.” I nodded grimly, dutifully. Maybe so, but as it happened, Mildred went downhill, and bottomed out, even faster.

I’ve left out a few noteworthy bit players in my Springhouse saga—such as the one-time beauty queen who often danced on roller skates back in the '40s and had a photo to prove it, and the dementia-afflicted widow who directed me to transform a smattering of old newspaper clipping into a detailed biography of her late husband. But the individuals I’ve written about today were the Springhousers I'l remember most. I called them “enriching” at the outset of this post. That might seem an overstatement in some cases, but it’s not. Trust me, it’s not.