I had brief, interesting acquaintances in those years: the woman who taught me to make bobbin lace when I was a tween, a Kiowa WWII veteran who I met in a laundromat in Oklahoma in college, but I experienced them as detours from the larger path.īy my forties I could detect and value more diffuse relationships: long connections over space and time with college classmates and distant relatives. When I was younger, at least into my twenties, if not longer, connections to other people came in large, gaudy chunks: passionate crushes, desperate need to fit in with friends, struggles to differentiate self from others that filled my whole field of vision. One of the first pieces of his that I read was his memory of sharing a pear with is grandfather, so when he hosted a gathering for our class, I brought him a jar of home canned pears. When we met, he gave me a kiss on the cheek and an affectionate squeeze of the fingers. Lives need those little interstitial pieces, with each bright spot here or there falling into a larger mosaic that sometimes I can’t even see. A small corner of each of our lives fell into a small space in the other’s and it made that small bit of my life sparkle. We were more than acquaintances, but I’d feel presumptuous calling us friends. His writing conveyed diverse interests, his unfiltered appreciation of humanity, gratitude for his own considerable good fortune, and an appetite for knowing more, even as the years weighed down his limbs and he cheekily drafted his own obituary. His approach to reading and commenting on others’ stories was both gleeful and blunt. But he had a way of capturing love and remembering beauty that spoke to me. In our shared class he was writing a memoir of a very full life that began in what is now the Czech Republic, and wound its way across oceans, through financial success and misadventure, parenthood, and several marriages.Īn engineer and entrepreneur by training, prose was not perhaps Roland’s best skill. The small overlap of our lives, and its mutual amusement and regard was a kind of joy I think I can only appreciate in my own middle age.īorn in 1936, Roland was roughly the age of my mother, but had perhaps more the temperament and life experience of my father: exuberant and confident of his own wit, a survivor of war, familial separation, and geographic displacement. He was well into his 80s, so I can hardly claim to be surprised, but I’d just seen him on our regular Zoom call, for the writing class we shared for the last two years. Close detail of GrackleCrackle by Laura Liz RuprechtĪ man I knew not very well died this past week.
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