Okay, I have been putting this off for a while, and you msay well decide to put it off indefinitely, because it is an obituary for a couple of guys named Bob, but, in the end, it’s more an article about me. I hate obituaries and eulogies like that, but let’s see if I can do justice to Bob and to Bob before I get to me.
I ran into Bob shortly after I took a job of work for a paycheck in Chicago. My employer tried a number of clever dodges to keep from paying me much (a whole nother blog) but in the end settled for getting me a second job. I would work both of these jobs until Covid came along, and one of the reasons I hung around so long with such a ridiculous work schedule was because of Bob.
Bob had become President of the club which was hiring me as a bookkeeper (not unlike hiring the Three Stooges to do your plumbing) and was determined to remake the sleepy old club as a more active outfit. He was a boisterous idea man who raised a few million dollars every year in HIS other job. A man of action, he was up against a lot of people who didn’t mind belonging to a club which didn’t ask much. He started a newsletter, aided and abetted some people who wanted to add a luncheon program to the traditional dinners, and wheeled and dealed to provoke a visible and exciting Centennial for the club.
With the new bookkeeper/secretary, he adopted a conspiratorial relationship. “What if you didn’t open that bill until AFER the monthly Council meeting?” he would suggest, and “I think I can get this printed for free if you don’t mind addressing all the envelopes for it.” His term in office was over after the first year, but he continued to push for attention and celebration in the Club and, when asking what I was up to, always concluded with “Keep up the good work!” I watched as he attempted, three times, to become a fundraiser for my primary employer, talked to him on the phone about articles for the increasingly large newsletter, and looked up data for him now and again in later days when his blindness slowed him down by perhaps one half mile per hour. I could not particularly credit it when his wife (always a partner in his efforts and as lively as he was himself) called to say he had passed to the Great Golden Ultimately and was even now probably discussing poetry wit Robert Frost. (He was not a great believer in an afterlife, but this is MY blog.)
I knew the other Bob in my primary job, and cannot recall when Evelyn convinced him to become a volunteer for us. As a relator, he was all over the area, and he was willing to pick up books for delivery. He had many adventures in that line, and I went along when an extra pair of hands and a reasonably strong back were needed. We unloaded the basement of a man who had been about to start a bookstore in 1964 but suffered family loss and had let the basement display sit for over thirty years until the state foreclosed. We cleaned out volumes of opthalmology magazines from a closet where there was space for one person to walk, sideways, on either side of a massive copy machine. We ventured into basements, attics, and back rooms, and once we fought against a 24-hour time limit to unload thousands of dollars of rare books before the garbageman came to take the rest.
He was as sardonic as the other Bob was jovial. He could be genuinely bright and cheerful, but he was always frank in his opinion of our annual book sale. “You just don’t have the books,” he’d say, shaking his head. “You won’t make as much as you did last year.” I learned that every year that he said something like this, we DID beat the previous year’s total, and when he was optimistic, we didn’t. As time went by, I would ASK him to give me a pessimistic review come July. He enjoyed the joke, but never realized he really was a reverse prophet. He went on venturing into White Sox territory wearing a Red Sov T-shirt until an exploding gall bladder and a couple of awkward surgeries left him more likely to deal with books from the bookshop he had in HIS home, assisted by his cats whom he named, among other things, Dumb and Dumber. I found it hard to believe the email when I found that he, too, had joined the Heavenly Choir, though he is probably spending less time singing than talking things over with A. Conan Doyle and P.G. Wodehouse.
The reason I find these two deaths particularly hard to understand is that these Bobs were part of my adventures in the 1990s, keeping a Club from quite running itself into insolvency and gathering books from hidden treasure troves around Chicago. Both these men were the embodiment of life and action and certainty that success was just around the next corner. But there’s another reason I just don’t get it.
See, if these two Bobs are gone, that means the Nineties are gone as well. And there is the barest possibility that my Thirties have gone with them. I will never be that age, embarking on another bookish adventures like those again. Now, if one Bob could keep going without his eyesight and the other without the tip of his spine, I can keep at this, too. But it does seem unfair that the adventures of thirty years ago should be so decidedly thirty years ago.
Blogsy Babbles 