During my recent trip to Morro Bay on the Central California coast, I fulfilled a quest many years in the making. I was pulling on a thread that had been with me since 1969, my freshman year of college.
Soon, Rob showed up in our two-man dorm room in Fischer Hall, teeth blazing behind a mischievous grin, which he never could seem to tame. We were each eager to size each other up. We would be roomies. And we would hit it off.
Somehow, Rob talked me into joining the college men’s glee club that year. Otherwise, my then-introverted nature would not have veered onto such a track. Rob was a second tenor; I was a baritone, and we had a ball.
Rob had several other untamed passions, including a love for acting and the theater. He toyed with the idea of an acting major. The challenge to try out something else new stuck with me. A rivalry began, which I won; I actually picked up more college stage roles than he did.
For our sophomore year, we decided to do the roomie thing all over again. We moved together to an off-campus house. Month after month tumbled along, and Christmas 1970 was around the corner. Rob decided he needed an adventure. He decided to hitchhike the 2,100 miles home to San Luis Obispo.
He nearly made it. In the California desert, the convertible left the road, headed into the sand, and flipped. The owner died instantly. Rob suffered head trauma, arriving at the hospital unconscious. He remained unconscious right through to the men’s glee club spring California concert tour. The entire glee club packed into his tiny hospital room, but Rob never woke up.
For the next thirteen years, Rob did not wake up. I visited Rob one more time during those years. Blind, permanently hunched over in the wheelchair, Rob’s body was pushed out into the grass and sunshine, but he wasn’t there. There was no crazy smile, no tenor voice, no stage presence.
I cannot think of a single day since Rob’s long-delayed death in 1983 that I have not thought of him. This sunny day, in the center of a cemetery, five graves down from his father, I finally visited Rob again.
How fleeting life can be, but how permanent the sway upon each other’s lives.
So, we must live well.