so long, old friend

When I first knew him, his name was Mr. Wood and he was the quiet, serious criminal defense lawyer, up the stairs from reception, down the hall, second office on the left. On his desk were tidy fans of clipped-together papers, corners matched and edges aligned. He was tall and squareish, already losing his hair, and quite intimidating (though not as much as Mr. H) to an 18-year-old newbie file clerk in 1968. A few years later, after a boomerang to LA, I came back to 3200 Fourth Avenue as the firm’s bookkeeper for a year, and he was a little friendlier – they all were – but that’s probably because I was 24 (instead of a teenager), and I wrote the paychecks and opened the mail they obsessed over. I was answering the phones there during the receptionist’s lunch hour one day when Mack called for Mr. Wood and resurrected our romance that has now lasted 40 years, but that’s a whole different story.

In 1975 I became a court reporter, he was my first client, and his name changed to Ken. With a handful of exceptions, I reported every deposition he took until I retired, almost 30 years – cases for insurance bad faith, the tuna boat that sank off Central America, the badly injured boy who ran off a bus in the then-brand-new development of Mira Mesa that had no schools, the man who was electrocuted by SDG&E lines in his front-yard tree, business disputes, family estate fights, the whole crazy range of civil litigation. Working with him was a court reporter’s dream job – he spoke in these perfectly constructed sentences at a steady 200+ words per minute, politely controlled witnesses who wanted to talk on top of his questions and lawyers who were snarly. He was businesslike and direct and careful. He treated everyone with respect. He asked me how best to handle exhibits and did exactly as I suggested, wasting no time, leaving no knots to untie later. I can still see his lefty printing on documents, straight and sure black rollerball lines, EX and a number, upper right corner. It is his 4 without lifting the pen that I copied and make to this day. The real-time transcripts I produced during his depositions were almost perfect first drafts; I never ever worked for anyone who made a better record than Ken.

He was very, very smart without being a know-it-all. He could tell when someone was trying to play him in a case but never pulled stunts like that himself. He was professional without being stiff or arch; he was honest. He could be canny and had a great poker face when asking a loaded question. He was a far better lawyer than others who got a lot more ink, but he never shoved anyone aside on his way to the microphone or waved his own banner.

Ken was charming in a completely authentic way. And funny, with that big ha-ha-ha laugh and his gappy grin. He was a terrific storyteller, and he smiled with his eyes. I don’t think I have ever known a more genuine, un-phony man. He was kind, really kind, and he cared – frankly and forthrightly – about things and people that mattered to him. He loved his kids and adored – adored – his wife. I can see him talking about her and these sometimes romantic places they had been – he would wink and Beth would raise an eyebrow and give a little shrug.

There are a couple of Ken stories that outline him for me. 

Shortly after Mack and I were married in 1988 I invited 25 or so of our closest friends over for dinner and waded confidently into water way over my head. Amy and I were in the kitchen struggling to get the main course out. With time ticking away in the dining room, people rattling silverware and running out of small talk, I began to think I might panic. Just then, Ken came in, asked if he could help, didn’t wait for an answer, started slicing steaks and delivering plates to relieved and hungry people, doing what needed to be done, and saved my bacon. Long before that night, he got me out of a different messy jam that no one else would touch, and taught me a hard lesson about friendship. 

He liked to tease, usually in a funny, harmless way that might, at worst, make you blush, but once in a while he was as relentless as an older brother.

We had been on a road trip taking depositions in Miami, day after day of slogging through testimony and documents, evenings spent wandering through parking lots with a bunch of other lawyers trying to find stone crab. It was winter but sunny and warm in Florida. On the way back home, exhausted and cranky, we all flew to Dallas for a connecting flight, only to find that everything was delayed by a vicious snow and ice storm. Many hours later, finally in the jetway, I was stuck a half-step from the plane’s open door, wearing flimsy cotton clothes and a pair of sandals, with a 20 degree wind flinging ice shards at my foolish-beach-girl self. Wet and shivering in my seat, Ken in his, we took off into inky darkness, banging and shaking, the plane bucking like a rodeo bronco. I might have forgotten to mention to Ken that I wasn’t exactly a fearless flier, might have just offhandedly said that I didn’t love turbulence. As we lurched up, down and sideways, going from momentary weightlessness to G’s pinning us to our seats, he started making fun of how tightly I was gripping the armrests and how it seemed that the cat had got my tongue except for the occasional falsetto squeak. I wanted to punch him. Through clenched teeth I said, “Stop it! It’s not funny!” He said, “I’m sorry. I can’t make the turbulence stop, so I was just trying to distract you.” Staring down this sincere attempt by a nice guy who was just trying to help out, I think I hissed, “Well, it’s not working!!”

I missed seeing him at the memorial service for Jeanie’s mother last Wednesday, July 2^nd, because I was putting Simone on a plane that was late. My dear friend Gail sat next to him and Beth and chatted about things that you chat about at a gathering after someone dies – other people who have died (one husband each, for Gail and another woman at the table), how people cope. Two days later – two more lunches later – it was Friday, the Fourth of July, and Ken died. This calendar blip, these three rectangles that say Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – when I see them on my computer monitor, I just shake my head: no, no, no. Why was the plane late? Why was there fog in San Francisco? Why on that day? I see Beth pretty often because we have lunch with a group every month and we had gone to a movie just a week before – the final thing I said, walking to my car, was, “Tell Ken we said hi!” – but I haven’t seen Ken in a while – a year? – and I can’t wish any harder that I’d made it to that memorial for one more smile and a hard shoulder hug. I wasn’t there because I must have been on Mars; that’s what it feels like, like I should have somehow known.

All weekend, since Friday, Mack and I have been looking at each other with these weird unblinking eyes (when I’m not crying) and saying things like, “I hope it was over in an instant.” I picture Steve Jobs saying he thinks dying is like flipping off a light switch: On, and then, a nanosecond later, not On anymore. If, instead, it involves being afraid and feeling pain, right now I would rather not know. I think of the hiking trip that Mack went on decades ago with Ken and Jim and that other friend whose name I can’t remember, how many times Ken told bits of those stories, how ridiculous and scary and hilarious it was, the trip and each repeat of its details – the marmot, Mack’s blisters and dehydration and borrowed boots, the Groucho Marx walk on the ridge. When we tell it the next time – and we surely will – Ken will be there, in the story, wearing a shirt that says, in faint little letters, “But I’m gone now.” 

It isn’t real for me yet, that he isn’t coming back. The more you love someone, the longer it takes for that to sink in. In the meantime, I’ll see him in every tall, bald guy wearing a plaid shirt and wire-rim glasses. I’ll wish, when I’m stuck next to some boring, superficial man at a dinner table, that Ken were there so we could have an actual talk about actual things. I know that there is no answer to Why Him and Why Now, that it isn’t any more complicated than that his heart broke on a certain Friday. I know that as much as his wife and children, his grandchildren and friends miss him, they – we – are all equally lucky that he was there, occupying these big, important places in each of our lives. And, finally, I know that the world would be a better place with one more Ken Wood in it instead of one less, that his death is, in ways as big as one of the mountains he climbed and as small as a salty tear, a tragedy.