VOW

In the unnecessarily neglected second volume of his trilogy, Fred Exley imagines his obituary: “His companion, Mrs. Mary Pcolar of West Leyden, related it had been a horrible death and that Mr. Exley had not died well.”
I am the age where I do not proudly describe the narratives all around me, but have found that many stories are telling me: viz, cancers of various sorts, cardiac arrests, and accidents have reaped several of my coevals, friends, and amoureux. I do not know the tenor of their last six weeks, but I am pleased to know very well the kind of life that was led by my uncle Dick. He built the boat shown here, aport in Buffalo, in 1957. He was on a cruise from Ithaca, through the Erie Canal, and out to the far western waters of Lake Erie. I believe he had no specific destination in mind, and I like to imagine him vaguely following winds and currents in Pigeon Bay, Ontario Province. He was not well enough to sail alone, so he took a companion, the hale and obviously considerate buddy in the dark hat. The trip involved much heroic and excessive drinking, ceaseless smoking, and doubtless women enticed in boatyard bars along the way. He actually had a slot machine on the boat to amuse his guests on his many parties. [Dick’s tell: when the boat was launched, he’d had his girlfriend christen the boat with a bottle of champagne; that is to say, not his wife, who doubtless somewhere in the far boathouse skulked.] He returned to Ithaca around Labor Day, and died a couple of weeks later.
It is quite natural to prefer a leave-taking of such robust, reckless, and insouciant spirit, to his several brothers’ bedbound inebriations of pharmaceuticals with cancer, pneumonia, and dementia. The latter were good men in their own way, and did a good enough job too, with their dying. In any case, few of us have the opportunity or courage to make a real choice in the matter of our going, but I do believe it is important to delude ourselves that we would punch our vanity in its nose, and die well.
Michael Jordan, a basketball player, capitalist, and sometime piece of shit, preferred not to speak on matters of race, or to diminish the burden of his brothers by, let us say, investing other than nominally in that community; he was usually uncomfortable in speaking on behalf of his race, and has been indicted as having a somewhat imperfect record in this regard. And in a somewhat similar way, bakers from Cleveland and carpenters from Boston were "uncomfortable" hopping off the transport boats at Omaha Beach, though they managed quite well enough to obscure their conceits in the face of urgency.
Pusillanimity and timidity scum the waters in which we all swim.
When I have the feeling that I am beneath the underdog, gasping with the blues, I can make bluebirds twitter and sunbeams dance by recalling that in 1970, George C. Scott rejected an Oscar and called “the whole thing is a goddamn meat parade.”
I now self-medicate by recalling that George C. Scott called most awards and therefore the vanities of gutless men, basically a meat parade.