"Done Too Soon"

We had gotten back out on the road again having cared for mom after her stroke for four months. Life was returning to its usual road routine, and the world was spinning in greased grooves once more. Then we were in Johnstown, Ohio one monday morning and the cell phone rang. I could see from the caller ID it was an old high school buddy of mine, Tom Furr, and I knew it was unusual for him to be calling and, thus, I knew something was up. But I wasn't even remotely prepared for what. Donny Lindsey was dead. He was 51 years old.

Donny Lindsey was my best friend in high school. We met through school and church, and he and I and Larry Gore became known around our church as the Three Musketeers, because if one of us was there, the other two were not far away. Tom Furr would become the fourth musketeer later in high school. We all played softball together, chased girls together, did all the things that teenaged boys do. Donny and I spent an entire summer together both bemoaning the losses of girlfriends, and we wore out a copy of Elton John's "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy." (See: We All Fall in Love Sometimes/Curtains) We were a pretty pathetic pair of musketeers! Donny and I were the male leads of our high school musical, Bye Bye Birdie, him playing the rock star and me playing his manager. It was perfect casting. Neither of us had to act, we just had to memorize our lines and cues. Donny was the one of us that the girls fought over to get. Me, Larry and Tom just hung around and waited for the fallout. And he had a quick wit about him too. He had the personality that caused people to naturally gravitate to him. After high school, I stayed at home and commuted to Georgia State University, as did Larry. Donny and Tom went to work. But we still hung out together and played ball for another couple of years. Then Larry left to follow a dream of becoming a pilot. Donny and I began to drift apart as we went in different directions in life. I went years without seeing or hearing from him, but every now and then our paths would cross. Donny had never attended one of our high school reunions until our thirtieth, in 2006. Donna had met Donny just twice, when his mother passed away and when my father died, and thus had not seen the funny side of Donny. We laughed all night long, mainly because of Donny. When we were leaving, she complained of her face hurting from laughing so much. That was Donny. It wasn't the last time I would talk to him, but it was the last time I saw him alive.

I have been reflecting on the past. I remembered my cousin Ralph. Ralph (along with practically all my relatives)lived in south Georgia and was three years older than me but he was the youngest of 5 brothers. I think he and I were close because with me he wasn't the youngest and he could be the big brother. Our birthday were both in July; his the sixth and mine the ninth. In fact, one year he was nine on the sixth and I was six on the ninth. When I was growing up, our house was a revolving door of cousins coming to the big city and living with us for a while. Ralph was no exception and he lived with us one summer after we had moved to Lithia Springs. But we too lost contact, the current of our lives moving us in different directions. About the time Donna and I got together word came that Ralph was having problems. Recurring headaches, balance and memory issues. He had had some skin cancers removed from his back about four years earlier and they had metastisized into brain cancer. He had surgery and it had left him with a left arm that was basically useless and weakness in his left leg. One of his brothers had hit it pretty big in Nashville and his daughter was getting married in the fall, shortly after the surgery. Ron made arrangements for everyone to come and stay in Nashville for the wedding and I kind of took care of Ralph (seeing how I had been a therapist), helping him get dressed and walking around. My best memory of this was once we were getting into the limo and he began getting into the car like anyone else would. I grabbed him and said, "Whoa, I know thats not how they taught you to do that in rehab!" He turned and grinned the Ralph grin. "Oh yeah!" he replied. I saw him again at his house in south Georgia a couple of weeks later. I had been down with family and was coming by to tell him bye. He was asleep in a recliner. I didn't want to wake him up so I left. It was the last time I saw him alive. He passed away a week or two later. He was 44 years old.

Ramona was my first serious girlfriend in high school; the one who, as the late great Lewis Grizzard would say, "tore my heart out and stomped that sucker flat", the one who I wore out "Captain Fantastic" over. She and I had a tumultuous, on again off again three years. The first breakup was the one that almost did me in. She broke up with me in the spring of my junior year. She was a senior (rare in high school for that to happen). I was devastated to the point of having what I guess was a minibreakdown, coming down with shingles and spending a couple of days in bed at one point. During this, I had won a couple of speaking tournaments through the Georgia Baptist Convention, and I had another competition shortly after the breakdown. My dad was an old school dad, not a lot of babying and most physical contact was discipline or horsing around. But this time, waiting my turn to speak, he was sitting beside me and he put his around me as we sat there. I was 15 or 16 years old. I never will forget it. Anyway, Mona and I finally broke up for good in the fall of my freshman year in college. I went many years without seeing her; I heard she got married and had a child. One day in church I was walking down a hall, someone passed me and I heard from behind me, "Calvin???" It took me a second or two. "Mona???" We spoke for just a moment or two and then went our separate ways. It was the last time I would see her. In the middle of dad's fight with Alzheimers I got word that she had cancer. I debated trying to go and see her but I didn't. Donna and I were on the road at this point but we happened to be home when the phone rang in the middle of the night. Mom called to say that dad had fallen out of bed and she couldn't get him back in. Now when I was a child I would sometimes fall out of bed onto the floor and not wake up. Dad would pick me up and put me back in bed. The circle had come around and now I was picking him up. Two days later a friend of mine calls me and lets me know Mona had passed away. I couldn't bring myself to go to the funeral. Instead I sat in my recliner at home and stared at the fireplace. Between her death and what was going on with Dad I was feeling a furious whirlwind of emotions and memories and couldn't make much sense of them. Donna came in the room and asked if I wanted to talk. At first I said no, but when I started, I couldn't stop. I began bawling like I have never bawled in my adult life. But in talking it out I connected the event I wrote of earlier with the present and made some sense of it all. Mona's breakup with me caused me to have what was probably my most precious memory of my father when I was a teenager. And at the time of her death, I had my most sad and precious memory of him towards the end of his life. Mona was in her mid forties when she died.

There is a song on Neil Diamond's first greatest hits album; "Done Too Soon". Its starts with a peppy rock/pop sound and the verses are just names of famous people who are no longer with us strung together and rhymed("Jesus Christ, Fanny Brice. Wolfgang Mozart and Humphrey Bogart" etc.). But the chorus changes gears and goes quiet and solemn...

"Each one there,
has one thing to share;
They have sweated beneath the same sun,
looked up in wonder at the same moon.
And wept when it was all done.
For bein' done too soon.
For bein' done
too soon."

I have been thinking about this song since November. I haven't been able to bring myself to blog, but I wouldn't write about anything else until I got this down. In the last ten years I have lost the cousin I was closest to as a kid, my first love from high school, and my best friend from high school. All were "done too soon." Now my mother is facing a long downhill spiral following a stroke and is just a shell of her former self with no idea how much longer this is going to last. My father died three years ago after a horrific seven years of Alzhiemer's. And I'm left pondering an awful question:

Is is better to be "done too soon" than "done too LATE"?

Donny was creamated and at his funeral his daughters carried his ashes down the aisle to the front of the chapel. Because he wouldn't be there to walk them at their weddings. Ralph was just beginning to start a blueberry farming venture in Baxley. Mona won't be around to help her son grow into a man. And yet, they are spared from the inexorable ravages of time. So: would you trade ten GOOD years off your life if you knew it would save you from ten BAD years? I don't know. At this point, I believe I would.

But on a final, less grim note, one of my favorite memories with Donny: We saw the Eagles in concert for the Hotel California tour some thirty four years ago and their last encore in that concert was "James Dean". So its chorus is my final tribute to Donny Lindsey, the king of cool in high school;

"You were too fast to live,
too young to die,
bye-bye."