Demosophia

Todd

I'm not sure why I've been thinking about Todd so much lately. It's partly because, I guess, I happened to share with him certain common fears about adulthood just as the Vietnam War was ramping up. (No, this isn't a war memoir.) And it's partly because I enjoyed the fellow so much, and feel a sense of loss that he passed away so young (in his late teens). I feel the loss of the innocence of youth for myself, particularly in the wake of 9/11, preserved in my memories of Todd. To some degree Todd represents an era that was relatively free of these encounters with unmitigated evil. As unsavory as the Cold War was, there was but one big evil to complicate life, and that fairly abstract and distant, at least for awhile.

Todd came from one of the more affluent families in Dallas, Texas. He was the grandson of a legendary developer and oil man, and the family is still in those businesses as far as I know. But when I met Todd at a military prep school in the Midwest I had no inkling of this impressive family history. Even though I didn't think of myself as "rich" I wasn't especially intimidated by those who were unambiguously marinated in wealth. And when it came right down to it, Todd was just a pudgy kid with an irrepressible sense of humor, rather than heir of a powerful family. He didn't think of himself as rich any more than I did.

Todd was a year behind me in school, but we both participated in the intramural rowing program, and we both hated the sort of institutional chow that cadets were served during group meal assemblies. For relief we'd take whatever opportunity the rules afforded to walk the mile or so along the lake to a small cafe that catered to students longing for a little non-institutional food. We'd always order a "hamburger steak with cheese," which was about the only decent thing on the menu. The meal came with fries and a small sprig of parsley, so it wasn't exactly nutritious... but it didn't taste like hospital food, which went a long way. We'd walk to the little cafe during the spring as waves quietly lapped the seawall, and we'd make the same trek in the dead of the brutal winter, when the ice curled up the seawall to the handrails and groaned at us like the doom of Shackleton's Endurance. The Midwest isn't gentle in that season.

While eating our meals at "The Shack" we'd often discuss what miserable military men we were likely to become, since following or giving orders was pretty low on our list of priorities... and Todd allowed that neither of us would stay alive very long once we were in the field. He was almost never in a serious mood, so even when he speculated about our dire fate it was in the spirit of absurdity. And there was something absurd about standing on that cusp between the world of the "greatest generation" and the world of the "Woodstock generation," though we only suspected it at the time. His favorite joke was to sneak up behind an upperclassman, goose the poor fellow suddenly with his hands clasped together, and exclaim with enormous enthusiasm and optimism: "Wunderbar!" Of course, this wasn't exactly an accurate description of the experience from their side of things--about as wonderful as being stepped on by a horse. He figured this trick would be a real icebreaker with superior officers in Southeast Asia. Can you imagine how horse-faced blue-blooded Lt. Kerry would've loved it? The image is seared, seared into my memory.

It was also common at the time to pilfer hats in the cloakroom, rather than go to the trouble of searching out your own as you rushed to a class. So to discourage the loss of a well-fitting hat Todd and I used a label-maker to place intimidating messages on the underside of the hat bill, suggesting to potential thieves that they ought to reconsider. One message implied that the original owner had an exotic scalp fungus, for instance. The details were usually so florid that they were hardly credible, but I managed to hang onto the same hat for an entire year once, so perhaps people just chose to be on the safe side.

I met Todd when I was a sophomore, during his freshman year. There isn't supposed to be much informal contact between freshmen and "upperclassmen" because of the military traditions. Freshmen were "plebes," or just a notch above a medieval serf. But these constraints had begun to relax by the time I entered the academy, and by the year after, had been largely discontinued except for the first week of school, which was dubbed "plebe week." And it just wasn't possible to avoid warming to Todd immediately anyway. He was an imp. He wasn't a rebel against the military culture so much as its lighter side. He just never even began to take any of it seriously. After all, we weren't actually in the military. We were just pretending. So he suffered it the way one suffers the verbal idiosyncrasies of a half-mad uncle. He'd listen attentively as a smile crept across the bottom half of his face. It wasn't mocking, but a reflective smile as though he were consuming a morsel of contraband candy.

That year the academy sponsored some sort of canoe trip down the aptly named "Tippecanoe River" in northern Indiana, where they maintained a woodcraft camp. Woodcraft was a summer program similar to Boyscouts, except that it was a boarding school, but at this time of year the camp was usually deserted. The idea was that one would volunteer for this sporting ordeal in order to represent one's unit in an athletic competition, and to get some time to commune with nature through the agony of defeat. The basic enterprise was a race from the starting point at the camp to a point downstream about 20 miles. Todd was somehow assigned to my canoe along with another underclassman named Foster. Since Todd and I had both participated in intramural crew we figured we had a leg up on some of the other sorry talent, but no one rightly expected the thrill of victory. So when we put into the river at about 6:00 AM it was with the full expectation of paddling like demons for the finish.

A light rain was falling as we put in, but we soon warmed up with the effort. Unfortunately the rain became more intense as the morning advanced, and the temperature plummeted. In addition, after about an hour our shoulders and arms began to feel like the arthritic hinges of old men. It wasn't so much that we were out of shape, since I was a cross-country and middle distance runner, as well as a sweep oarsman, and Todd was a decent oarsman at that level as well. The problem was that the specific paddling motion of canoe competition was new to us, and it didn't take long until we were worn out, as the work, cold and general discomfort took their toll.

And as the pace gradually wore on us, we also began to take some wrong turns. I know it seems odd that one would be able to take a wrong turn on a river, but there were lots of places where such meandering streams split at a turn, or an island or peninsula, and it was easy to follow a dead end. We seemed to find every dead end the river had to offer. At a certain point Todd decided paddling was just a cruel and wasted effort. And since we could still get downriver by just drifting... we started to take it easy. This also proved a fairly good way to avoid wrong turns. The weather cleared too, after midday, and we just drifted along talking about girls and upperclass jerks, though I don't think the term "jerk" was actually utilized. At one point Foster stood up to take a pee, and Todd seized the opportunity. Just at the point where Foster's arc had reached its theoretical and actual zenith Herr Wunderbar violently trundled the canoe from side to side with enough vigor to deposit the incompletely relieved young fellow headfirst into the waist-deep and sluggish river. And it wasn't very long thereafter before Foster had used his standing leverage to deposit the rest of us into the muddy water as well. It's amazing how heavy sweatclothes can become when wet.

At that point we'd been passed by all the other canoes in the "race," so about the only tangible objective left was to just avoid being caught out on the river after dark, which might have involved some frantic rescue efforts on the part of the adults. Someone, I think it was Foster, had a few cans of Vienna Sausages and some pop that we shared as we drifted, caked in mud and other river refuse. The sounds and smells of springtime seduced us into an utter stupor. Never has a poorly conceived enterprise turned into quite so much fun, and I have to credit Todd with being the first to see the enormous opportunity for diversion.

I'm not really sure why Todd's folks sent him to military school, because it clearly didn't suit him very well. Or rather, he wasn't cut out to excel at military pursuits, though he might have been very well suited to making the best of a bad scenario. Nor was he very athletic, tending toward pudginess, but he did have rather strong arms so was a reasonably good oarsman. But frankly I think he participated in crew simply because he savored the opportunity to get away from the campus whenever possible. Once out on the lake you were free to row anywhere you wanted, provided you could talk the other four boys into it (including the cox)... For a few hours we were almost like "normal highschool kids." Except that there were no girls, cars, or parties. Freedom is relative, I guess.

Anyway, my years as a cadet approached an end, and I was troubled as to just what to do with my life. Staying out of what had become an unpopular war was primary, and I also wanted to attend a school where I could make up for some lost time interacting with girls. I was accepted at a number of universities, but decided to attend Southern Methodist because a few of my friends had gone there, and I'd heard the place was full of "southern comfort." SMU is in Dallas, and during orientation I dropped by to visit Todd before he was scheduled to return for his final year at the academy. I showed up at what appeared to be a mansion, and there was a small TV camera (I think) monitoring people at the door. After I rang the bell Todd came down to let me in, and we went upstairs to play pool for awhile. I'm not clear whether this was his own personal playroom, or some sort of family room, but it was pretty relaxed Texas-style hospitality. Todd was typically unpretentious, and the help staff were like old friends or family. Or perhaps they were family, for all I knew. After awhile we got a bit bored and slipped out to find something more exciting.

We ducked down a number of alleys and infiltrated several intimidating hedges until we got to a local garage or filling station. Todd was wearing cutoffs with no shoes: the archetypal "uncadet." There was a young kid at the garage doing some mechanical work on several oily-looking motorcycles, and Todd talked this fellow and another into giving us rides on their Triumphs. They seemed to regard Todd as a younger brother, alternately indulging and teasing him. We rode around the neighborhood making as much deep-throated racket as we could, and tempted some of the local canines to chase us. The dogs, more intent on taking a piece out of our ass than on where they were going, slammed headfirst into a big hedge that came right down to the edge of the street. We'd then circle back to tempt them again. It didn't seem to matter much how many times we played this trick, the dogs always fell for it, slamming headfirst into the hedge as though it ought to have disappeared in the mean time. My theory is that it must have been nearly as much fun for the dogs as it was for us, though I can't be sure.

Anyway, after spending most of the day with Todd I finally made it back to campus that night, and Todd left for his last year at the academy shortly after that. I never saw him again. He graduated on schedule the following year, and entered the University of Texas at Austin, which wasn't very far from Dallas. But somehow we never connected. Early in my sophomore year, as I was being seduced by what George Will later called "that slum of a decade" we held a small party for former cadets who were attending SMU and TU during "TU/OU Weekend" (pretty much an annual drunken mardigras-like free-for-all coordinated with a football game between Texas and Oklahoma.) But for some reason Todd, who had intended to come up for the party, didn't make it. I heard a rumor, a short time later, that he had become seriously ill and later heard that he had passed away from that illness. I never checked to see if the rumor was true, because I preferred to believe it wasn't. But a short time ago I finally verified through alumni sources that Todd had, indeed, passed away. I know none of the details, which is probably just as well.

I don't know if we'd have remained friends in the midst of all the turmoil of those years. I didn't maintain friendships with anyone else from that era of my life, so it's doubtful. Perhaps one of the reasons Todd has been on my mind lately has something to do with the fact that my perspective on the world has become almost entirely my own, and that the influences of my past no longer determine the future that I see for myself and for my fellow man. This makes me almost as free, in some ways, as I was when I was 18. Having arrived at that place again, I can almost touch the earlier experience. It seems strange to think that someone I remember as a recent friend missed most of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights era, as well as the entire counter-culture movement of the '60s, the era of self-discovery and craziness in the '70s, the selfish '80s, the fulfillment of the '90s with the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, and finally the whole War on Terror and the "cultural schizophrenia" of the West's struggle against Totalitarianism 3.x. He knew none of it, but sometimes I can't help wondering if his presence might have made a difference. That experience we shared when we were boys transforming into men, encapsulated so efficiently by the cloistered academy life that it rushes back to me in its entirety the instant I put my foot on the campus, was among the final memories of his short and promising life.

How fortunate we are! May we make the best of the next turn in the river.

Update: Part of the reason I decided to write this eulogy was that I figured it might contribute some experiences with Todd that his family lacked, though the truth is my familiarity with him was far less than theirs. To that end I recently told them about this post, and I hope they find some value in it. What one experiences in the cloistered atmosphere of a military boarding school has some unique characteristics, the remembrance of which might enrich their recollections.

But most of my reason for writing this memoir really has to do with finding meaning in what seems at first glance a meaningless and unfortunate death. In other words, it has more to do with my grief than anyone else's, and as much to do with the grief I feel at the loss of our cultural innocence in the wake of 9/11 as the loss of my friend... who, in spite of things, I feel is probably doing just fine. I wish Todd were still around, but if he was he'd be seasoned by many of the things that have seasoned my life, so it's doubtful that he'd have retained his youthful impishness. I am grateful for the random conditions that led to our knowing one another, however briefly, and have a sense that the posting of this item allows me to say goodbye in a way that nothing else could.

Posted by Demosophist at July 31, 2005 04:45 PM | TrackBack