Death of THE Salesman

For as long as I knew Terry Anderson he was obsessed with time.  Not time, like Dr. Brown from “Back to the Future,” it was more that he continually counted the days, hours, and minutes left in front of him.  I think it was the clock that drove him to be the kind of person I knew him to be.

 From the first day I met him, we were friends. For some time, while I was a reporter, we would spend a lot of days sitting together in his office and then going out for lunch.  Over that time, we developed scheme upon scheme on ways to make enough money to supply us with enough cash to retire.

 We never really got anywhere with those ideas, but it was food for the processors that were our minds.  Often, Terry would come up with some idea, where our “earnings” were very small, but the extrapolation over a large number of sources was huge.  If we could make a nickel on every one of these widgets and then get half the universe to purchase them at these very affordable prices we could retire next week.

 Pipe dreams, really.  Things to keep a mind active even when there wasn’t much other mental fodder around.

 It probably helped that he was a fellow New Yorker.  We never seemed to miss a thing during our discussions on how to make our lives better, and consequently, the lives of our families.

 And it was our families that drove each of us.  And, it seemed that over time that 30 minute drive to see Terry got longer and longer, as my personal life started getting busier and busier.  And I sit here at this computer and think of that Robert Frost poem, “The Road not Taken”, and I think of that one line that sort of exemplifies what happened to us:  “Yet knowing how way leads on to way”.

 I like to think that our friendship never wavered. I wish, now more than ever, that I would have taken the time on my trips to the Endocrinologist’s office to stop by and say “hello” and just touch base with my old pal. But that is what happens, just as Frost says, way leads on to way, and we don’t have or take the time to change our steps.

 We get wrapped up in our kids and wrapped up trying to eke out a living that is more than just paying the bills.  We stop dreaming of short cuts, and quick fixes, and how we might be able to bend the financial world even just a little bit, to help us on our personal trek.

 And then things start to happen.  I never realized how bad things were going for my friend.  I heard some snippets and some news, but it always seemed to be far off and like we had an eternity to pull back together and to share notes and laugh like we did back in the early ‘90s.

 The last time I remember seeing Terry he had come to watch my son play football against Midlothian High School.  It was a cold and very blustery night.  We huddled together, trying to find solace from the wind to no avail.

 It brought back to mind how Terry, one night when my car broke down around the corner from his house, came to our rescue.  My son, Geordie, the same football player he had come to see, had run face first into a strand of barbed wire.  He had a gash across his nose that would get four stitches, and we were stranded with a blown water pump.

 Terry arrived in the family minivan, looking for the world, and to us, like salvation.  He carried us to take home some boys who were with us, and then to the hospital where Geordie got a few stitches.  What kind of friend is that?  The very best kind.  I rue that I lost touch, especially as now I can never make that contact again.

 And so it goes, unfortunately, much as Frost said, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and being one traveler, long I stood” and perhaps too long.  Good bye Terry, my friend.