just me

In my life I remember Wanting to be two people. One was a four-star admiral in whose organization I worked, but two tiers down in an 06 billet with a two-star admiral as my boss. It was my second and last Navy tour in Washington DC. I remember the instant that my Wanting evaporated: one morning when I was standing at the urinal the four-star came in and stood at the urinal next to me. The thought swept through, hey! he's just a man like me, and he's short not tall like me, and he's sixteen years older, and he has to stand here in a public restroom just like I do. Nanh! That admiral died of cancer nearly twenty years ago. Nanh, I'm good.

The other was Anthony Bourdain, whose life and work seemed so enviable. Anthony traveled as I once would love to have done. He ate as I can still imagine eating, and in places beautiful, picturesque and romantic beyond imagination. More than once I have thought I'd love to live the life of Anthony Bourdain. Yesterday all that came to end when the first thing I read online was Anthony Bourdain Dead of Suicide. What an apparently enviable life to destroy. And he not only took it from himself, he took it from us, imagination and dreams along with.

If I can find it again (it may be saved on my other laptop, zero battery and charging at the moment) I'll post a link to a thoroughly enjoyable article Anthony Bourdain wrote two decades ago. And at the end of it links to a couple more things he wrote. Yep, here it is:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/04/19/dont-eat-before-reading-this

OR, WANT TO REALLY KNOW THE GUY BETTER? - - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/anthony-bourdains-moveable-feast

As of today, because of Anthony Bourdain, television and online are full of information about suicide, especially places to contact for help. Reports so far suggest that Anthony Bourdain lived with depression. Maybe clinical that he hid from everyone but himself, maybe treated, maybe not. Maybe he had a catastrophic moment known only to himself. Most all of us have had those. Probably, nearly everyone suffers some sort of depression from time to time. When it comes on me, my immediate and deliberate self-treatment is to remind myself, "this has happened before, many times, it will pass in a day or two and I will be thankful that I just let it pass and am back to life and love." It's usually incident-related or memory-related, or maybe just my nature. But I understand. Still, Anthony Bourdain was not just his own person, he belonged to us. Surely, if for love of us if not for love of self, he could have found another way to deal. None of us belong only to self, we are needed, we belong to those who love us. Indeed, we belong to all of society, and to the cosmos, and to God who graciously put life on earth for us to enjoy, and for God to enjoy us. 

If I look in one of my old wallets I will find it: 1955-1956 when I was a junior at UnivFlorida I went to church every Sunday with two friends from Pensacola who were Baptists, to First Baptist Church, Gainesville. Good friends, great old hymns lifting the roof, in those days good preaching. One Sunday's bulletin printed a proverb that appealed to me, I clipped out and saved in my wallet, it's still around here. "Somewhere, someone you may never know is watching you, following you and doing in their life what you do in your life, if for no other reason than that they have no one else to follow." I am as self-centered as the next person, and you do not know me, and by no means have I lived a life that I would want someone else to follow, but I've always had that clipping in the back of my mind. Including through depression that sometimes comes on like a morning fog, then is burned off by the sunshine.   

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. 

And life goes on.

T

AND WITH LIFE, THE CRANK PHONE CALLS HAVE RESUMED, SO I JUST RESET MY IPHONE TO RING ONLY CALLS FROM "CONTACTS." IF YOU CALL AND I DON'T ANSWER, IT'S BECAUSE IT DIDN'T RING. CALL BACK AND LEAVE A MESSAGE!!