Bandana Bob

My friend Bob died last week. His memorial service was held Sunday. I wasn’t able to attend but he deserves this moment of my, and your, time.

Bandana Bob we called him because when he worked tending bar at Strawberry Inn in Pinecrest, CA, he always wore his beat up do-rag. Always blue, always tied just above his piglet of a pony tail. He could hustle a full bar like nobody’s business and still manage to fill the room with big guffaws. For all his free-thinking ways he still believed in “excuse me, please, and thank you” and if someone forgot their manners he’d stare them in the eye and ask “what’s the magic word?”, withholding their order until they acquiesced. No one ever dared call him on that practice, probably because he was right.

Bandana was a skier – he loved nothing more than spending the day at Dodge Ridge during the season or backcountry when Sonora Pass opened up. He met and married Lynda back when we worked together but only with the proviso that, when ski season started, she wouldn’t see him for the next nine months. I skied with him only when I felt in top form; for a guy 20 years my senior he whipped my ass on every run, all day long.

Bob was very much his own man, a renegade. He was an old hippie with more stories and jokes than a stand-up comic, every one of them heartachingly true. When I first met him he’d been sober for 25 years and I always admired his pluck that he could face his demons and overcome them every time he stared down that bottle behind the counter. Not just overcome, overwhelm them with his bravado. But then, he tackled everything that way and we adored the courage of his convictions.

The old dude hadn’t been well for the past many months. He’d been confined to a wheelchair after a freak infection and surgery and just declined from then on. I suspect he missed strapping on the planks, shooting the bull with friends in the locker room, looking forward to charging down the hill on a day that was always better than the one before.

It’s an odd moment, to remember someone who could only make you smile and yet cry because he’s gone. It’s difficult to understand our own mortality much less try to comprehend how someone like Bob could die. He was supposed to be, no, he was, eternal.

Oh, and I almost forgot my manners. Thank you, Bob. For just being you.