ElementalMom

Today, I found out that my friend Dave passed away.

It’s a body shock on so many levels. When I called Walter, we were sobbing one minute, laughing the next. Typical, of us, and of Dave.

It’s shocking because Dave died of a form of cancer so horrific, I don’t have good ways of describing it. And I think about the kind of guy Dave was, and I just have to wonder how someone so good could have something so horrid happen. Really makes you spin your wheels about the unfairness of it all.

Dave was a guy who worked with profoundly autistic kids. He was the sort of caregiver who could sit with one kid, day after day after day, and eventually, draw them out by sheer patience. And not have it make him crazy, or bitter, or hardened.

Dave was a guy who was a storyteller. Not just a guy who told stories; he was a storyteller. He created magic with his words, and I have seen him stop an entire street at the Northern Renaissance Faire cold, enthralled, hanging on his every word. Here’s a link to him telling “Oscar and Etaine”, embedded in an obit of him that also tells some of his particular humor.

I’m sad on another level, because Dave is the first of my compatriots, my tribe, to pass on. I know that once you get older, your friends start dying and that’s part of the natural cycle, but I was not ready for it to begin yet.

I’m sad because I had wanted to take the kids to see him perform, and in the steady march of days, I just hadn’t done it yet. Because there was always another day, right? But we’re out of days. And sometimes “carpe diem” is a good idea, and sometimes it’s like a solid kick to the gut.

And I’m sad about Dave in the way that many people were sad when John Lennon died. They weren’t sad for him, so much, but for the fact that with his death, the Beatles truly were never going to get back together. Dave was a SeaDog, and although he was a solo gigging kind of Dog, with him gone… a door that was never even really real is forever gone. It’s a whole other kind of passing and another deep kind of sadness.

I’m not going to be able to attend his memorial. But as I was telling Walter, one of my best memories of Dave was when we lost Black Point Faire, while working together to rip apart the Hootch, Dave, who apparently knew enough of golf to play passably, was plotting to come back and play a few holes through the course they were going to put over our beloved streets… dropping wild blackberry seeds on every green he covered.

I have no idea if he ever did that or not. But ever since, when I see a wild bramble thicket, I think of Dave, and I smile a bit. Such a small thing, a berry seed, and so tenacious once it gets going. Such a small thing, the spirit and contribution of one man and so tenacious a memory to hold.

Related posts:

1. Aurora’s Birth Story
2. Shaye’s Birth Story
3. Love Story Too ~*~ A Belated Valentine

Tags: Black Point Faire, Dave Ponkey, death, memorial