Thursday July 23, 2020

    Today is the anniversary of our great friend Jerry Solom's death on July 23, 2019. I wrote this memoir/conversation on July 20th., hours before he was airlifted to Mayo Clinic, where he died on the 23rd, under hospice care.

    I laid in the grass under my old Toyota four-wheel drive pickup where it had been parked for weeks. I was watching a thinning stream of black oil empty into a catch pan below it, the drain plug in my hand. I was thinking of my friend, Jerry Solom, who on this day, was in yet another fight of his short 73 year life, a ventilator tube down his throat to help him breathe, his kidneys under dialysis to remove fluid from around his heart and lungs. There I was under that truck’s rusted exterior, seein’ what Jerry couldn’t see, hearin’ what he couldn’t hear; feelin’ the wind upon my bare arms in the shade of that old truck ... that he hasn’t built a front bumper for yet although we’ve talked about it a dozen times, drawn crude pictures, and scribbled down our measurements!

We sketched bumper designs

    It was on after-leukemia afternoons like this, an end to a workday, he’d get tired and we’d walk into his shop, and he’d motion toward a stool for me to sit on, him smilin’, and sayin’,
    “There’s a cold beer in the refrigerator there, if you want one. I’ll take one of them waters.” 
    Of course, I’d always accept a beer.

    The afternoon sun would reach across the expanse of the shop’s concrete floor and its myriad electrical cords, welding cables, welding tables on wheels, and reflect off the high ceiling and walls of white steel panels to brighten the organized clutter.

     His cushioned recliner offered him comfortable repose for the curved spine that leukemia had left him, leaving him three inches shy of his former height of five foot six, but I’d tell him, 
    “What you lack in height, Jerry, you make up in stature,” and of course, he’d smile and defer the compliment.

    But he is a giant among his scores of friends who know his admiration-worthy story as a welder super hero, husband, father, grandparent, uncle, friend who, among too many more things to mention, built a 38-foot steel sailboat by himself that he and a crew successfully sailed to Norway in 2000, 'round Europe and back in 2008.
 
    And here I am under my old truck ... doing a simple task he'd done many times on his own vehicles, where, if given the choice he'd gladly be again at this exact same time.

    Jackie encouraged me to drive to Grand Forks today, this evening, now, and see him during perhaps his last days, but it’d be all for naught. I can’t do him any good. He wouldn't know me. His whole family is around him. Prayers are streaming in from all over the world. There’s nothing I can do now. I helped him in January, down in Florida, when he needed my help.

    But I'd lose any strength I had, once I saw the emotion in Marion’s eyes, his children’s faces. It’s best just to be here, safe in my own head, until I’m not ... and that, likely sooner than I want to know.
    
    Maybe I’m meant to simply change oil on the truck, then crawl out from under it under my own power to appreciate all I have in the immediate; acknowledging that the sweeping trajectory of our lives can change in the blink of an eye.
    
What I do know, is I sorely miss the man already, 
my friend Jerry Solom.

 Me and Jerry, with Marion in the background, on Bill McDonnell's boat, in Stonington, Maine. 2015