On Public Relations

On the passing of a friend (my best, who often felt like my only). I will miss him dearly.

My best friend Bobby Girillo died last week at the age of fifty-one. Below are some memories of our time together, and the profound influence he had on my life. I shared portions of these reflections at his wake on Friday night.

“Bob was my best friend.

 He was a son to my father, an uncle to my children, and a brother to me.

My best attributes, and there is some debate about whether I have any good attributes at all, have their underpinnings in the wonder years Bob and I spent together. Indeed, the complexion of my life today is very much a reflection of the gifts he gave to me.

Bob was many things to many people, but to me he was, and this is not surprising given his lineage, to me he was a teacher, a man who taught me things about the world.

We had little in common when we first met. I was a scared, skinny, sickly 6^th grader from Long Island, very much the runt of the litter. Bob was my polar opposite: strong, confident, and at ease with himself in a way that I never imagined I would be able to be. Still, we became friends, mostly because he took me under his wing. His message to me was the message of any good teacher: you can do this. We can do this. We can do anything if we start by doing it together.

Bob’s classroom was the great outdoors. And it was there that I followed him. Bob led me to the woods. He led me to the water. He led me to the mountains. And he led me to the stars.

Bob introduced me to things in my youth that are now central to my life as an adult.

The first time I went hiking, he was by my side.

The first time I went camping.

The first time I went paddling.

The first time I went fishing.

The first time I went skiing.

The first time I went star gazing.

The first time I went bird watching.

The first time I heard the cry of the loon.

When I was young, I spent a lot of time looking at his back, just trying to keep up with him. I would see his head and neck craning skyward, looking up at the trees or the stars or peering through a pair of binoculars with a full pack on his back, whereas I was simply trying to keep from falling down. But of course I did fall down. Literally, like the day several of us were hiking Mount Abraham in the rain, and I was trying to climb over a downed tree on the trail, and I slipped, and the weight of my pack pulled my backwards, and there was nothing I could do to right myself, and so I fell, pack first, into a mud hole. I was stuck. I couldn’t move. And I thought I was going to die. There. In the mud. All alone. I was on my back, flailing like a turtle, sinking slowly, crying too, screaming to the others for help, but they were in much better shape than I and far, far ahead on the trail, and I imagined this was going to be my inglorious ending, my screams for help unanswered, my last breath taken in a mountain bog.

Bob heard me. He always heard my cries for help, was never too far ahead or out of reach. Bob understood the pain of my inexperience, got down on his knees, took off my pack, gave me his hand, and pulled me upright. He did it then, and continued to do it for all our years together. He was kind in that way, never wanting to see me embarrassed or hurt.

Walking beside him, my stride was more confident. Standing next to him, my place in the world more certain.

He made me feel at ease in the dark, far from civilization, when the night woods came alive with movement and sound.

He taught me to observe the movement of water in a stream, over and between rocks, in fast sluices and eddies, when casting for fish.

He pointed me to signs of spring unfurling from damp forest earth – early meadow rue, bunchberry, trillium, and lady’s slipper – flowers I have come to know. He taught me about leaf shapes and needle clusters, and now I am able to identify white pines (five-needle clusters), pitch pines (three-needle clusters), and red pines (two-needle clusters).

He would interpret complex weather systems long before meteorologists were able to report out on them.

He knew arcane things about animals, plants, and geology. He was that curious. About everything.

He collected things, mostly found objects from his travels outdoors. He was an amateur naturalist who saw beauty in both the ordinary (an acorn) and the extreme (a class four hurricane). When we were kids and others our age were consumed with athletics and found idols in sporting arenas, Bob befriended a professional naturalist who worked for the Nassau County Parks Department and took him as a mentor. We would spend hours with him, walking in the woods, along the beach, or simply playing with his botanical curios. This was not normal teenage behavior by any stretch of the imagination.

Bob walked through the world with a child’s sense of awe and wonder. Morning dew and summer thunderstorms made him happy, as did the first blush of autumn color (it meant that apple and pumpkin picking were just around the corner). He treated mountaintops as sacred places. On winter hikes, an etching of hoarfrost on tree limbs would fill him with amazement, as would rime on a windswept summit. And the call of a loon would render him speechless.

In some ways, Bob marched out of step with time. He was an old soul, and his gait, that of an Indian elder. But it was his views that I came to adopt and cherish. His views were nourishing for my soul, as was our time together. Bob’s gift to me was a way of seeing and experiencing the world.

Bob was not perfect – no one is, and our childhood together was not without blemishes. We broke rules. We did the bad things that teenage boys were prone to do then (drink, smoke dope, and steal) but all in all our young lives were uneventful in this sense: neither one of us ended up in jail.

When I was in trouble, there were two hands I could always count on: Bob’s and my father’s.

They were a pair, the two of them. My ninety-eight year old father, who has a distaste for others born not of meanness or malice but of life experience – most people are full of shit, is how he puts it – could and would spend hours talking with Bob. My father loved him as if he were his own.

They had traits in common. They loved to fish. They loved the prospect of adventure. And they were interested in history (Bob asked my father more questions about his years overseas than I did). Both were obsessed with weather to an almost pathological degree (Bob loved Harry’s stories about the hurricanes he had lived through in south Florida).

In addition, both were comfortable in the spaces between sentences. Both could live in the quiet. They were men who enjoyed their solitude.

My father turned 98 last September. Bob was able to join us for Harry’s annual birthday lunch. It was a warm autumnal afternoon, really a glorious day. When Bob arrived at the Landmark, my father looked up at him and smiled. It was a broad smile, a smile that said everything about the good feeling Bob was able to engender in a man nearing his end.

My father lives just up the road. I spent some time with him earlier this week. I told him about Bob, what had happened. He took the news like a bullet to the heart. He was quiet. Said nothing. A long space at the end of a sad sentence. And then I saw a tear well up in his eye.

In all the years I have known my father, I have seen him cry only twice: once my mother died. And last week, when I told him about Bob.

Bob knew his path from a young age, and was able to marry his skill sets and passion to a job working for the Nassau County Health Department. The broadest definition of his work was to protect Long Island’s water supply. This he did for over twenty years. He was vigilant about it, and as good a custodian for the environment as one could hope to have.

Bob was the kind of friend who took more pride in your accomplishments than his own. He was certainly proud of mine, and for some mistaken reason, judged my professional life a success (clearly, he wasn’t following me on Twitter). I think it had something to do with the business. He was charmed by publishing and heartened that I was working in an industry that turned on reading and writing and the making of books. He was also fascinated by the many personalities I have worked with through the years. He loved hearing stories about President Clinton and Julia Child and Katharine Hepburn. He wanted me to write them all down, was hoping that I would publish a book someday. “Imagine the stories you can tell,” he would say to me. I think I will try. I owe him that much.

Bob cared about his friends and was loyal to them all. He knew what it took to maintain a friendship. He never let too much time pass before picking up the phone. He was old school in that sense. The phone was his conduit, and anytime he called we could and often would pick up threads of conversation that had begun decades ago.

I know I will reach for the phone and want to call him when I catch my next brook trout, or when there is a winter storm on the near horizon, or when my daughter graduates from High School, or when I’m having an impasse with my sister about care for my father, or when I’m thinking of jumping some tail (as men in the seam of midlife sometimes have a tendency to do).

Bob knew my appetites, he knew my past, and he would frequently remind me of the latter when I was considering the former. He kept me honest about who I was, and when we were young, about who I had the potential to be.

I will still wait for the phone to ring and expect to hear his voice on the line, regaling me with stories about his latest adventures, be it in Bali or Brooklyn or with the attractive stylist who cut his hair.

I will still wait for him to pull up in the cabin driveway, and remember the first thing he always did upon arrival – crane his next skyward, taking in the view.

The good things he carried are ours to carry now, and one of the absolute joys of my life is seeing his spirit live on in my children. My son loves to hike. That was Bob’s gift to him. My daughters love to paddle. That was Bob’s gift to them. My wife loves watching the clouds in the daytime and the stars at night. That was Bob’s gift to her. I love sitting on the cabin deck listening to the hard wash of the Saranac after a mountain thunderstorm. That was Bob’s gift to me.

Every good thing in my life is in some way a tribute to Bob. He owns a piece of my heart. And he always will.

Rest in peace, brother.”