Fair Sailing

When I meet new people with whom I share a spark of recognition – that "Aha! You are a member of my Tribe" moment – I try to make a mental note of the circumstances and setting. That way, if our friendship grows and lasts through the years, I can trace our chronology to the time and place we met. It's like keeping an internal scrapbook or a psychic journal entry to which I can refer in years to come.

If the relationship goes awry, I can flip back twenty years or so and say, "His apparent dislike of dachshunds should have been the tip-off that bigger conflicts were ahead. What was I thinking?" Or, conversely, I can summon up the instant I knew we'd be life-long friends by the rumbling chuckle or the quick retort. That kind of kismet is magical – it can't be scheduled or anticipated. You just collide with someone else's energy and they become part of your story, while you, simultaneously, fuse with theirs. Your lives, from that day on, are inextricably linked.

You expect to have many adventures with your new friend. Perhaps you'll have play dates and listen to music and go to parties. Perhaps you'll pet-sit for one another, double-date, sail together and commit to an annual celebration of Elvis's birthday. You could anticipate, even, that you'll disagree or that the deepening of your friendship may reveal things about yourself and your friend that only comes from long intimacy.

It's unthinkable, then, that some day, you can be on the earth, but your friend is not.

You cannot know, from the first delighted hello in an office hallway, that twenty-five years later, you will be carrying his ashes to his memorial service.

Yet, now my friend is contained in a handsome silver vessel and we meet to honor his life and everything he meant to us.

I gather with my friend's other tribal members – his colleagues, his softball team, his long-ago loves and the final love of his life, his childhood friends, and the friends of his wild youth.

My life has cross-over connections, too. His friend is my ex-husband, who is there with his second wife who has become close friends to my ex-husband's former girlfriend before me (and she's there, as well). Coincidentally, my friend's former colleague is married to a woman with whom I worked when we were both in college in the late 70s. My girlfriend (who was the former roommate of my friend's former sweetheart) is now the office administrator for my friend's former business partner for the company for which I formerly worked. My connections are expressed over and over like a reshuffled genetic deck – same genes, different combinations.

But on this night, our splinter relationships are secondary. And we come together to put our friend in the center of our orbit. All of our spinning lives revolve around him – he is what holds us together in our friendship and our sorrow.

This is what we say:

We knew this day would come, but now, of course, it's come too soon. So, we are gathered here to celebrate the life of Scot Woolfenden Alexander...engineer, sailor, hippie, colleague, lover, prankster and friend with a party he would have loved to attend.

Some of us here knew him first as a kid or a teenager. Some of us knew him romantically. A few of us celebrated his 50th birthday with him sailing in the British Virgin Islands. Maybe one or two of us fell out with him over a disagreement, only to find our friendship again after time had passed. Many of us worked with him. One of us knew him best in his final years.

We all knew a different side of Scot's unique and multi-faceted personality. And we are here this evening to remember and try to put words to our memories and feelings. Words that, in their small and inadequate way, will allow us to illuminate Scot and our journey together.

So many adjectives come to mind when trying to describe Scot like intelligent, generous, intense, stubborn, hilarious, loving, playful, irreverent, irrepressible. Only single words, but all words that make stories.

Scot was the consummate engineer...a tinkerer. He could design, he could build, he could fix. Scot's first high-school love, Janis, tells the story of Scot making his way into her father's good graces by helping him rebuild a Studebaker in the family garage. In the years following, he'd visit Janis driving a series of retired school buses as he crisscrossed the country on his counter-culture travels.

Those of us who met Scot in the early 80s remember the last of those junker buses parked out to pasture and his old noisy maroon BMW, which must have had a million miles on it. When he finally bought a new vehicle around 1993, we were stunned. It may have been the only new car he'd ever owned.

Scot was generous with his friends and his acquaintances. A woman, not someone with whom he was even particularly close, once told me that she had borrowed money from Scot when she was having a crisis. She hadn't been able to pay him back at the time she told me this, but she said that what she deeply appreciated was that Scot never brought it up to her. Never asked about repayment – never treated her differently or made her feel awkward.

And, oh my God, Scot was stubborn. He was intense and passionate. He wasn't afraid to let you know what he thought. But you could fall out with Scot...you could agree to disagree and you might need to part for awhile to cool off and get perspective. But if you were his friend, you were his friend always. The door was always open for reconciliation. He was always happy to see you.

Scot was certainly irreverent. After finally getting his engineering degree from UT, I remember he had it beautifully matted and framed, and then he hung it over the toilet in his bathroom.

I think, though, the word, that fully expresses Scot's spirit is irrepressible. There was no adventure, no practical joke, no party, no silly behavior, no absurd notion in which Scot was unwilling to initiate or participate. If you just pause right now, you can practically hear his maniacal chuckling that came from somewhere deep within.

And nothing, I mean NOTHING on heaven or earth was more important to him than playing with his friends. Scot embodied a saying of Buddha's that goes "Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared."

One of my first adventures after meeting Scot was planning a party with him. It was winter and dreary and we decided to have an indoor beach party at Steve's house. I remember that Scot went over the pros and cons with me of whether it was advisable or not to bring in a load of sand into Steve's living room. And, he would have done it if I could have figured out an efficient way to get sand out of carpet.

Around 1994, I took my 80-year-old mother on vacation with me to Bar Harbor. And I sent a postcard back to work and said that things were going as well as could be expected. Although my mother was getting on my nerves, I was trying to be patient and not get too irritated. I wrote in the card that I hadn't even made her take off the blue hairnet that she insisted on wearing everywhere.

When I got back to work the following week, Scot called me into his office over the intercom, which he'd never done before. I walked in and everyone I worked with was standing there. It took me a moment to realize that they were all wearing hairnets. I think Scot kept his on all day, even though I remarked that he didn't really need one.

Larry tells the story of how he was bent over his desk at work. He had a set of completed engineering plans in front of him and was just looking at them one more time before they went out the door, when he sensed that someone was in the doorway. He looked up to see Scot standing there with his hands behind his back and a grin on his face. Larry says that time slowed down as Scot brought up a Super Soaker water bazooka, and aimed through the tiny plastic gunsight shooting right into his face. Larry froze, disbelieving and certain that Scot was bluffing - no engineer would hose down someone who had a full set of bluelines on his desk. Larry was wrong, and even though he was armed with his own small pistol, he was woefully out-gunned.

We all have many, many stories to share of our wild adventures with Scot. But we all know that beneath that playful otter-like exterior, Scot was not always a lighthearted man. He was not a person without a care in the world, and he did not have a trouble-free life. As a child and a young man, Scot had to surmount devastating family losses. Those years were not always kind and Scot learned early how to shut down, put his defenses up and keep an emotional reserve.

For someone who tried to live his life so lightly, Scot was very familiar with darkness. He wasn't always able to be as gentle as maybe he wanted to be...perhaps he always felt that he needed to protect himself just a little to be on the safe side. But I think that's what caused him to make lasting friends and cherish them deeply. He made us his family. And like every family, we made mistakes with each other, and then we came back together.

In these last years, rather than just withdraw, it was so important for Scot to travel and visit his dear friends. He finally felt the ease to tell them how much he loved them and hear, finally, how much he was loved in return.

We celebrate the life of our friend, Scot Alexander:

If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower or inscribe a stone
Nor when I'm gone, speak in a Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I have known.

Weep if you must,

Parting is hell,

But life goes on

So laugh as well.

-Joyce Grenfell

Fair sailing, Scot. All our love goes with you. We'll see you on the far shore.

Note-to-Self 2: If you would like to take a moment to reflect on the ancient conundrum of human joy and sorrow, I invite you to watch Matt do his Silly Dance. Please watch it in honor of Scot and to all those we have loved and lost. Thank you.

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Ingrid divides her life between the San Juan Islands (where her heart lives) and Austin, Texas (where her paycheck is generated). While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra ..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane."

Ingrid is an old-school Libra and believes that the Revolution should be a catered event.

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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