Tonight I got thinking about my ex-friend Gary Maavara. He was a senior executive at a big Canadian television network where I was a TV reporter. His office was in Carpet City; that’s what us grunts in the newsroom called the executive offices, since the bosses had carpeting and we had grungy gray linoleum.
Gary and I went drinking one night and we toasted with glasses of beer. He said something in Finnish (who knows, maybe it was sköl or Hölkyn kölkyn) and I dutifully repeated it and clinked my glass against his.
“Whoa, who taught you how to toast?” Maavara shot back.
Pardon?
“Are you so lacking in social graces that you have never learned how to properly accept a toast?”
Gary went on to say that in Finland, when a glass is hoisted in your direction, the proper response is to stop everything else you may be doing, look your hoister right in his eyes, and really connect as you repeat the toast.
“It’s an insult not to really be present for a toast,” he said, and offered the toast again, his gaze like some full-frontal wrestling hold. I returned it for a moment and damn, it was so visceral; and then, so was my life. Not to be missed. Not to be brushed off. Not to look aside. A fellow human has just made contact.
Tonight a bunch of us cruisers went out to dinner – a kind of going away party for all of us. One by one, our boats are being hauled ashore as we flee the scorching summer winds that blow off the Sonoran desert. We’re all heading north: to the Bay Area, to Washington, to British Columbia, to Colorado.
And at one point, someone offered a toast and I remembered Gary’s wise words. The nearest person was Gordon from Far Country. I made eye contact with Gordo and held it and there I was, back in my life and among my friends.
It’s difficult saying goodbye for me; I’m awkward at it and want it to be over quickly. But I also didn’t want the evening to end.
The photo above was taken outside the Thrifty ice cream parlor in San Carlos. It was somewhere around 9pm, a hot wind was blowing about 10 knots from the north, and all of us were trying to connect and say goodbye at the same time. Not easy!
There are a lot of rules in life (the Ten Commandments come to mind) but the simplest and most meaningful (to me) was the elegantly terse precept in E.M. Forster’s novel, Howard’s End.
“Only connect!” he wrote.
Like if you do nothing else, if you lack the energy to follow all of the Big Ten, or cannot maintain sharia law, or say you forget the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, and can only remember one; then only connect.
Thanks to Wikipedia I was able quickly to find the exact citation in Howard’s End.
Here it is:
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
So: many thanks to Forster, God, Allah, Buddha and Gary Maavara. All have tried to get us to connect. Especially thanks to Gary, who was there in person to deliver the commandment.
Perhaps the next time you Google your name, Gary, you’ll find this obscure blog posting, smile, and raise a toast to an old, fading friendship.
Hölkyn kölkyn!
This once proud and starchy pirate flag has now been hauled down and has been put in a growing pile of stuff we will take back with us.