WHAT I WILL MISS ABOUT BOB TOTH
When I heard the news that Bob would not return through those doors, the place felt empty, even though there was a dozen people working there that day. He was a mostly stealthy figure anyway, he didn’t say much and when he did, he mumbled. His hair curled around a weathered face, with more lines deepening whenever he smiled.
Full disclosure, I did not work with Bob in the larger way that others did. I was in IT and as such, I was a support person whose life-purpose was to provide service and make others’ work lives easier, more efficient. Still, we engaged in small ways. In ways that go unnoticed, until one or the other of us is gone.
Bob was an avid reader, always promoting Haruki Murakami novels, trying to get me to read them. Whenever he walked by my open door (he would once a day), he stopped to lean in, and crack a joke about Trump or Bush or Chenney. We were both ardent democrats and we would often discuss the incongruities of Republican administrations. I will miss those conversations, though they were often at times when I was up to my elbows in detailed, mind-numbing work. In my head, I was always thinking Not now Bob! but eventually, I pushed my chair away from the desk, and we talked sometimes for thirty minutes or more.
If I had a book of poetry, say a Tracy K. Smith, or an Audre Lorde collection of poems, lying on the corner of my desk, waiting to be pulled out for lunch time reading, he would crane his neck to read the title, and ask me about it and we would discuss what we were reading. He beamed with pride that time I travelled to the Berkshires to attend a poetry reading given by his wife Cynthia.
Once, he gave me a folio print of a Czeslaw Milosz poem, Gift, which was so tender that I just had to hang it in my office:
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
Czesław Miłosz
I understood that I was the man in this poem who realized he was once that gardener, carefree, and unembarrassed by this fact, but now I realize that Bob must have felt the same way. We were both finding paths into our gardens, recognizing the irony of lives that are pulled us away from us, from where we wanted to be, of jobs that at some point, in some small way, let us down. We are both idealists, but we are also both pragmatists!
A colleague stops by and we discuss the poem hanging on my wall. She talks about the strange synchronicity that the great choreography of life surrounds us with. She points out to me that the last line of that poem could be read as a triumph of death. We discuss the last time she saw Bob, that Friday before he left for the weekend, how inexplicably she sat him down and had him talk for hours about his vision of the paper brands he has nurtured for decades, and how she never saw Bob so animated. Perhaps, she wondered, over the years, with corporate mergers and take-overs, the paper stopped mattering and that made Bob withdraw, resigned even, to the eventual demise of these papers he helped bring to market. But things were changing with the latest acquisition! He felt optimistic. He left for the weekend, and now neither one of us will see him again.
There are so many conversations about politics and art and culture and literature we have waiting for us. Like billions and billions of others who leave for any weekend, we assumed we would be back on Monday, he would be back, to stop at my door, and “waste” a half hour of my time talking about things normal people don’t talk about. “Mi-chael” he would mumble when he came to my door, emphasizing the first syllable of my name, stretching his scarecrow arms above his head, holding the post and lintel of the door of my office.
I will miss his dry humor, of which I always received during one of my daily “Bob Visits”. I told him he should submit entries to the New Yorker cartoon captions contest and I believe he may have tried his hand at a few, I am not sure. He always had me laughing out loud when he came up with his crazy ideas for beating Republicans in various elections. When Trump announced during a campaign debate that Senator John McCain was no hero because he got shot down, I reminded him that I am pretty sure he made that joke eight years ago when McCain ran against Obama. A bit edgy, sure, harsh, but it was a joke between two friends, not a public statement or tweet. And with Trump it’s about meanness, and with Bob it was always sardonic.
The best of each of us is lost in the small transactional movements of living, those confessional moments we have with each other, the ones no one will ever know or believe. So much of our relationships are built on this, which is why storytelling is so important. I’m reminded of the line from the Galway Kinnell poem Strong is Your Hold On Me: “I believe in the miracles of art, but what prodigy will keep you safe beside me?” Art and culture does not protect us. It’s not meant to. It leads us to a more humane way. It makes the journey more bearable. Right now, there is a Bob-shaped hole in my universe and it hurts. Time, they say, will help, though I am not really sure I want it to heal completely. See, missing him reminds me of that connection, and that I will miss too.
Over the coming days and weeks, others will add their own puzzle pieces about what they will miss about Bob, but these are mine. I am most saddened by the sudden realization that there was a depth of him I never had the chance to get to experience, given our jobs. He once referred to me during a presentation to the rest of the company at a sales meeting as my comrade, Mike Biegner or something like that and it was true. We were not friends in the sense of going out and buying drinks and asking each other what we did last weekend. We both just liked to be around things and people that represented a universe so much larger than our office walls.
He reminded me of this, over and over and over. I will miss that too.
Full disclosure, I did not work with Bob in the larger way that others did. I was in IT and as such, I was a support person whose life-purpose was to provide service and make others’ work lives easier, more efficient. Still, we engaged in small ways. In ways that go unnoticed, until one or the other of us is gone.
Bob was an avid reader, always promoting Haruki Murakami novels, trying to get me to read them. Whenever he walked by my open door (he would once a day), he stopped to lean in, and crack a joke about Trump or Bush or Chenney. We were both ardent democrats and we would often discuss the incongruities of Republican administrations. I will miss those conversations, though they were often at times when I was up to my elbows in detailed, mind-numbing work. In my head, I was always thinking Not now Bob! but eventually, I pushed my chair away from the desk, and we talked sometimes for thirty minutes or more.
If I had a book of poetry, say a Tracy K. Smith, or an Audre Lorde collection of poems, lying on the corner of my desk, waiting to be pulled out for lunch time reading, he would crane his neck to read the title, and ask me about it and we would discuss what we were reading. He beamed with pride that time I travelled to the Berkshires to attend a poetry reading given by his wife Cynthia.
Once, he gave me a folio print of a Czeslaw Milosz poem, Gift, which was so tender that I just had to hang it in my office:
A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.
Czesław Miłosz
I understood that I was the man in this poem who realized he was once that gardener, carefree, and unembarrassed by this fact, but now I realize that Bob must have felt the same way. We were both finding paths into our gardens, recognizing the irony of lives that are pulled us away from us, from where we wanted to be, of jobs that at some point, in some small way, let us down. We are both idealists, but we are also both pragmatists!
A colleague stops by and we discuss the poem hanging on my wall. She talks about the strange synchronicity that the great choreography of life surrounds us with. She points out to me that the last line of that poem could be read as a triumph of death. We discuss the last time she saw Bob, that Friday before he left for the weekend, how inexplicably she sat him down and had him talk for hours about his vision of the paper brands he has nurtured for decades, and how she never saw Bob so animated. Perhaps, she wondered, over the years, with corporate mergers and take-overs, the paper stopped mattering and that made Bob withdraw, resigned even, to the eventual demise of these papers he helped bring to market. But things were changing with the latest acquisition! He felt optimistic. He left for the weekend, and now neither one of us will see him again.
There are so many conversations about politics and art and culture and literature we have waiting for us. Like billions and billions of others who leave for any weekend, we assumed we would be back on Monday, he would be back, to stop at my door, and “waste” a half hour of my time talking about things normal people don’t talk about. “Mi-chael” he would mumble when he came to my door, emphasizing the first syllable of my name, stretching his scarecrow arms above his head, holding the post and lintel of the door of my office.
I will miss his dry humor, of which I always received during one of my daily “Bob Visits”. I told him he should submit entries to the New Yorker cartoon captions contest and I believe he may have tried his hand at a few, I am not sure. He always had me laughing out loud when he came up with his crazy ideas for beating Republicans in various elections. When Trump announced during a campaign debate that Senator John McCain was no hero because he got shot down, I reminded him that I am pretty sure he made that joke eight years ago when McCain ran against Obama. A bit edgy, sure, harsh, but it was a joke between two friends, not a public statement or tweet. And with Trump it’s about meanness, and with Bob it was always sardonic.
The best of each of us is lost in the small transactional movements of living, those confessional moments we have with each other, the ones no one will ever know or believe. So much of our relationships are built on this, which is why storytelling is so important. I’m reminded of the line from the Galway Kinnell poem Strong is Your Hold On Me: “I believe in the miracles of art, but what prodigy will keep you safe beside me?” Art and culture does not protect us. It’s not meant to. It leads us to a more humane way. It makes the journey more bearable. Right now, there is a Bob-shaped hole in my universe and it hurts. Time, they say, will help, though I am not really sure I want it to heal completely. See, missing him reminds me of that connection, and that I will miss too.
Over the coming days and weeks, others will add their own puzzle pieces about what they will miss about Bob, but these are mine. I am most saddened by the sudden realization that there was a depth of him I never had the chance to get to experience, given our jobs. He once referred to me during a presentation to the rest of the company at a sales meeting as my comrade, Mike Biegner or something like that and it was true. We were not friends in the sense of going out and buying drinks and asking each other what we did last weekend. We both just liked to be around things and people that represented a universe so much larger than our office walls.
He reminded me of this, over and over and over. I will miss that too.
posted by M C Biegner at 1:51 PM
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