The Fibber!
By: Tyler Posey
Ray and I were classmates at Brown, which Ray always referred to as Brown UNIVERSITY, so that people would know he graduated from a real college, not just a color. We became great friends at Brown UNIVERSITY, even though I was from the South and said my “R”s funny. Over the last 50 years, we never lost touch, though I suppose there were small gaps in communication, as in any relationship. Ray would end those gaps by calling and gently asking, “Who broke your fingers and wrists so you can’t dial a phone?”
When I moved to Washington many, many years ago, I had no place to live. Ray and his friend Tim Durkin had bought a fixer-upper house in Northwest Washington, so I asked if I could move in with them, join the great adventure, and earn my keep by my labor. In sum, it did not go well.
It was winter, and there was a constant 15 mph wind coming through the gaping holes in the walls. Water would pour through the living room ceiling if you forgot you could use the upstairs bathroom only on Thursdays when the whatchamacallit valve in the pipes was unfrozen.
And Ray was vewy, vewy mean to me, even though he knew I was a delicate soul. He forced me to get up well before 10:00 a.m. on weekdays. I had to groom and dress MYSELF in five minutes, eat breakfast (which I had to make MYSELF) in seven, and ride into town with him for work. In the car, I was forced to listen to him go on and on about the fascinating ins and outs of the Federal Home Loan Bank Act and which, uh, restaurants the lawyers in his office liked to go to at lunch hour.
On weekends, Ray gave me harrowing jobs, including using a World War I, Army surplus steamer machine to remove the wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom. A lot of the work was overhead, and the applicator part would leak boiling hot water all over me. (Come to think of it, maybe that’s where the living room flooding came from.) True, there was only one layer of wallpaper, but beneath it were at least 10 layers of old newspapers. I wasn’t allowed to take a break until I steamed and peeled off all of them. It was awful, though not devoid of educational value. I learned from a headline in the last layer that a Mr. Dewey had defeated Truman, which was something I never knew. President Truman must have won in some later election because to this day we call him President Truman, and he said, “The Buck Stops Here.”
Ray was also a bit of an exaggerator and never let the facts get in the way of either a good story or a good skewering of one of his “friends.” Until the very end, Ray went around telling everyone he met, including total strangers, that as a young man he had lived with a guy who was so clueless and effete that he showed up for the roofing work wearing penny loafers without socks and carrying a sledgehammer. What a fibber! It was wingtips and a planishing hammer. (Didn’t think I knew what a planishing hammer was, did you?)
So I moved out. But we never moved out of each other’s lives. Over the years we loved each other—hell no we didn’t SAY so—and he taught me a number of aphorisms that are truly meaningful and helpful to me. I say them to myself, with his voice,
all the time.
If I have written about myself too much here, then I have forgotten his, “It’s not all about you, Tylah.” If I ever get borderline insubordinate with my bosses at work and jeopardize my job after 40 years in government, then I have forgotten Ray’s “What the hell do you care, Tylah, if USAID [fill in the blank]?”
And best of all, for when times are rough, we can be sad, but we are well advised to accept things we can’t change and to move forward with life fully, “It is what it is, Tyler.”
