Saying Goodbye to My Best Friend of 50 Years
by David Wheeler
Delivered March 17, 2018, in York, Maine
Roland and I were best friends. That is what we called each other. We didn’t do it to rank our friends, but through a series of special circumstances and interests, we were extremely close. He knew my parents, my sisters and my children. I remember his father sitting at his desk paying the bills, and his mother saying she couldn’t understand why some people “Boil the ass off their pot roast.” I remember his brother Leonard with his own kind of tall, thoughtful elegance, turning to look at me with the same observant eyes that Roland had.
I will try to share with you some of the things I loved about Roland, and to celebrate both him and our friendship, just as one sample of the many friendships he had.
I met Roland when I was a student in Hartford High School, in Hartford, Vermont. He was an English teacher. He was never my teacher, but sometimes a group of students would go out to visit him where he lived in what was—according to legend anyways—a fixed-up chicken coop. We talked about books and current events at a time when the Vietnam war was raging, young men were being drafted, and the nation was divided. To have an adult take an interest in me because of my mind was something new.
When I heard Roland had died, I called up an old high school friend who attended these chicken-coop gatherings. He is now a San Francisco architect who has won an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. He called Roland “The first interesting adult we ever met.”
I had grown up a couple blocks from a town library in nearby Hanover and I loved to read. I also had developed a secret obsession with poetry. Roland and I quickly bonded over our love for words, the music of words, and the nuances of language. I sometimes bicycled the 15 miles out to the farm where he lived and we would spend time together. We sang Leonard Cohen songs while we hauled his trash to the dump. We went swimming in Mascoma Lake late at night. We memorized poems and recited them to each other. I watched him bake cookies, feed pigs, grow vegetables, and pound fence posts. And all the while we talked. And talked.
Roland made it clear, just by his example, that I didn’t have to be restricted to old definitions of what it means to be a man. I could write poetry or dance or go to the ballet and still be a man.
Roland loved nature and was a close observer of the natural world and its cycles and moods. Much of Roland’s work life as a gardener or a house painter depended on the weather. He watched the sky like a sailor, reveling in the changes passing through clouds and the sky, and planning his next few workdays accordingly.
When Roland was in his thirties, he put a front-page advertisement in the local New Hampshire newspaper, The Valley News. It said only “Wanted—just to see—fringed gentians.” These rare wildflowers are a beautiful deep blue—cerulean—and Roland just wanted to take a look at some, not to pick them or transplant them. A woman did call him up and invited him over to see some fringed gentians, and he was thrilled.
Roland had already started writing poetry when I first met him. I know poetry is difficult for many people, but Roland truly tried to reach readers with his poems. Many of his poems are about daily life—about weeding, picking apples, cutting hay with a scythe, and or clipping an old woman’s toenails. In that daily life, Roland saw both details and symbolic power that others missed. My wife Lar and I took Roland and Paul, his partner at the time, to the Civil War battlefield, Antietam. Where I could only see rolling-green fields, he could see thousands of young soldiers dying, and wrote a poem about how much the place haunted him.
Not only was Roland in love with words, he was also in love with knowledge—history, archaeology, botany, astronomy, you name it.
When my wife, Lar first came to the United States from Thailand 18 years ago, she had a lot of questions. My answer to almost every question about cooking, gardening, and U.S. history was the same—“Ask Roland.” He had a personalized, regional knowledge you still can’t find on Google. He was a Yankee through and through, complete with a Maine accent. Lar soon developed her own relationship with Roland. We were married in his back yard, and he was my best man.
It pains me that my work life has usually kept me at some distance from Roland and I haven’t been able to make the drop-in visits that others living closer to him have been able to make. I tried to communicate in other ways, with phone calls and in later years sending him photographs by e-mail from my travels, so he could see the places I was visiting—Roman ruins in Turkey or the Jordan desert. The odd thing was Roland often knew more about the places I was visiting than I did.
For 25 years I worked in Washington, D.C. for a publication called The Chronicle of Higher Education and every Thursday afternoon the book editor put out a pile of review books on a public table. I tried to get there early and look for books I or my friends, especially Roland, might be interested in. My wife Lar would box up my selections, sometimes before I read them, and ship them off to Roland.
Through these volumes, Roland I journeyed together through Scandinavian crime fiction, British naval history, Cold War spy novels and many other genres, both fiction and nonfiction. I continued the tradition when I moved to London five years ago, searching the city’s rich and eccentric bookstores, hauling books back to the United States, and sending them up to Maine.
This anecdote isn’t about what a great friend I was. The reality was that Roland was a delight to share books with. He devoured books and magazines for two or three hours each day. They were one of his greatest pleasures. And I got great pleasure from discussing the books with him. A package of books arrived at his house the week before he died.
Although Roland rarely traveled, I brought friends from Italy, Thailand, and Syria to his house. He was the warmest of hosts, endlessly curious about his guests, patient with those who spoke English as a second language, and always hospitable. Some of my favorite meals of all time have been consumed on his back porch—better than any white tablecloth, five-star restaurant.
Last year Roland decided to rent out a room through the Airbnb website. He quickly rocketed to the status of “Super Host” and had 22 sets of guests in one summer. He described himself on the website as having a “great appreciation of nature, literature, education, gardening and all the characters who we meet in this world by chance, who make it all possible.”
An early guest, Melita, wrote in a review that “Roland is a kind, funny engaging host who deeply knows this piece of Maine. He describes himself as homebody but he is an artist homebody and his home is filled with art, books, flowers and hand-painted furniture. All of the things I enjoy. The garden is gorgeous even in August. I can only imagine what it is like in June or July. I wish I had had more time to just read in the garden or draw. There are so many things to love about his place that it is hard to choose.”
Roland responded: “Thanks so much for the flattering review. I’m sure some of it is true!!! Please stay in touch. You are always welcome here.”
His reviews were all, in fact, five star. He told me that he informed his guests upon their arrival that the most important house rule was to “have fun.” I’m sorry I never got a chance yet to rib him about his guests calling him a “national treasure” and a “wonderful and kind soul” and saying that his house looked like “something out of a fairy tale.” I agree with the guest who called his gardens “majestic.” They are majestic.
This morning, I noticed a tall pile of seed catalogs sitting on a glass table in his house, and I imagined Roland going through them, preparing for spring.
On Facebook, the day before Roland’s death, when he had his brief stint in the hospital, I wrote a post called essentially “Nine Reasons I want Roland to Get Well.” I knew he wasn’t going to, but in the heat of the moment I wanted to get those reasons out. One of the reasons was simply “The glass looks half empty to me some days, and I need you to tell me why it is half full. You were always good at that.”
Roland was an optimist—the best kind of optimist. He was aware of the things that are going wrong in the world, but most days he persisted in not letting them get him down.
Sometimes Roland did feel blue—I remember one Christmas two years ago as he prepared to take down his tree, he lamented that he had more Christmas’s behind him than before him. He was right.
In recent years I knew Roland’s health was going to sharply limit his years on this earth, so I made a point of going to spend more time with him. His home was for a while my second home, as I had rented out my house in Washington while I worked overseas. I checked out the television weather report with him, shared simple suppers, and then watched reruns of “Mash” or whatever his favorite PBS show was at the moment. I brought him some of his favorite foodstuffs—Emmental cheese, Green Mountain coffee—and filled up his van’s tank with gas. We had a terrific Thanksgiving with many of his family and friends in November.
Roland wasn’t perfect—there’s times he slipped into monologues and didn’t leave enough time for others to speak. I’ve spent a few hours at his kitchen table in places from Enfield, N.H. to Cape Neddick, Maine, pinned down under withering verbal fire, as he went on about one of his passions or some injustice that upset him.
But Roland Labrie was a great man. He wasn’t a policymaker, a politician or a corporate chief executive, but he was as good a friend, family member, or neighbor as you’ll get. If you needed to borrow a paintbrush, get a jumpstart for your car, or have someone check on your cat while you were away, Roland would be right there.
In recent years, I believe, Roland seemed to find a better balance between his hermit side—he loved to be alone—and his social side. He enjoyed conversation and engaging with people. His participation in the local garden club, the historical society, his high school friends, and the group of friends who played a form of speed Scrabble, called Take One, meant a great deal to him.
I haven’t said much about Roland’s battle with addiction, because that story had a happy ending many, many years ago. Roland won. His sobriety meant a great deal to him and I know he helped many men and women find their sobriety and stick with it.
In addition to eulogizing Roland, I want to say just a few comforting words for the people who are gathered here. As we wander in the country of grief, it is easy to think we are alone, like the survivors in an apocalyptic movie. But we are not. We have each other. When I was in London last week, far from all of Roland’s friends and family, I sat still in the morning on a couch and looked over a patio brick wall at a patch of blue sky. I closed my eyes and imagined sitting in a circle holding hands with Paul, with Jeff, with Roland’s other family and friends, and grieving together.
In Roland’s life there is a simple lesson that he left for the rest of us. It’s a lesson that has found its way into many phrases over the ages: Carpe diem. Seize the day. One day at time. Don’t live in the past or the future, but in today, which holds immense possibilities for those of us who are still alive. Reclaim the present. Don’t lose yourself in the past or be overly anxious about the future. That is the lesson that I learned from Roland.
I will always hold Roland near to me when I read a great book, watch the world closely, or spend time with his many friends.
May Roland rest in peace, the peace of death. May you find your way through your grief to your own peace, the peace of life.