Donald Wheeler

As suddenly as cousin Donald Wheeler appeared in our life, he disappeared one day. In between lay a good number of Thanksgivings for which the lanky old man would appear in his "purple people eater", his beloved custom GM van on the rare short wheel base to spend the holiday with us, "his cousins". The vehicle, as we got to see it, had always over 200,000 miles on it.  Donald had it  rebuilt at one point, because it was his goal to drive it until he died. Well, it almost worked out that way. Named after the capability of accommodating at least seven passengers, the vehicle proved its usefulness at Nayna's family reunions which she began organizing for her mother sometime around the turn of the century. That is also where Donald resurfaced for Nayna. She remembered him from her great grandmother's home when Nayna was a teen but hadn't seen him since. Donald was known in the family as working for Anchor Motor Freight, presumably a lifelong job in accounting until he retired and began a second career as part-time tax consultant for H&R block. He took annual continued education classes and worked during the main tax season until he was eighty.

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Donald didn't change much during the ten or so years we knew him as a Thanksgiving guest. He'd show up the day before in high spirits in spite of an arduous drive on the New Jersey Turnpike on the busiest of travel days. He liked to say that he was doing "faan-tastic" and that "life was getting better every day". His face had many smile wrinkles around his blue eyes, he could be quite charming. He was tall, slender and big all around, the type who doesn't fit into any airplane seat, which is maybe, why he didn't fly. He went swimming on a regular basis and was hooked to doing morning stretches. He had long thin, grey and somewhat stringy hair which he bunched into a tale in the back like an old hippy or folk singer. He slept long hours at the rate of 12 hrs a day. On cold nights he would go to bed in a white night cap with a pointy end. The only noticeable change from year to year was that his speech got slower and slower. Living originally with a  partner in his house on 1025 West George Avenue in Linden NJ, and then alone, after the partner died of aids, he enjoyed having company and an audience. He regaled us with lengthy stories from the past which we had mostly already heard in previous years, stories which were stretched by long pauses when he searched his memory for names, dates and words in general and during which he pursed his lips to exhale long puffs of breath. Many stories involved his brother David with which he had a somewhat strenuous relationship and "camp", a cabin in Maine located right at the water which he and "brother" now shared. David spent long month "at camp", a definitely even more monastery existence than the one in Linden. In the winter he would load the van on Amtrak's auto-trains with  sleeper cars and go to Florida. From there he would drive to Texas, where he visited brother at times. I think Donald never took a plane.

Our kids who were still living at home or later came visiting for the holiday took Donald as some kind of odd uncle from a bygone era with artefacts such as his old flip phone to find addresses, names or numbers or told us about working on his old Commodore computer with 256 MB RAM or some such thing which he still fired up to do some housekeeping.

The seats in his van were covered with purple frottier towels and when he parked it in front of our house he always carefully flipped the large side mirror in as if he had parked a big rig of the kind his old employer had sent across America.

Cousin Donald, unsurprisingly, had long, slender fingers and liked to sit down and loom over our piano to give it a workout. He played long jazzy improvisations showing great finger dexterity and sense for music but there was hardly ever anything with a melody and I don't know if he could play sheetmusic.

He was very gracious, lauded Nayna's or my cooking inevitably as "fantastic, restaurant grade", brought a box of Merlot, the only wine he would drink and invited us one night out to wherever we wanted to go. He loved inviting us for dinner and he hated to leave after Thanksgiving, sometimes staying so much beyond the holiday that we began wondering how to tell him that he didn't live here. At the restaurants he would use all his charme to not drive the waiters crazy when he modified the menu items with very particular instructions especially pertaining to the obligatory starter salad (No onions, dressing on the side). Donald was good eater but he never cooked a thing and kept downtown Linden's diner scene alive all on his own. He liked to take an extra dessert home in case he would wake up at night hungry.

During the fifties he had lived in the Baltimore area for a while when he served in the army at Abderdeen. He reminisced about those long gone days when Baltimore had still streetcars while we were cruising through today's much shrunken but shinier city. I gave him once or twice my city tours and he was one of the most grateful guests I ever had on board, showing interest in many aspects of the city. He specially like the visit to the streetcar museum.

Last year Thanksgiving Donald was sick and didn't come. This year we never heard back after Nayna called and e-mailed him again. During the holiday we wondered several times what Donald would be doing. Although with Jonas and family visiting we were not lonely but I missed his fussing and turkey praise ("best meal I have ever eaten in my life") anyway.  After the holiday was over, Nayna finally called Donald's brother David to ask what was going on. That is when we learned that Donald had crashed his purple people eater last year sometime around Thanksgiving, that he fell into ill health and died of a stroke last December. Brother never called, sent a death notice, or published an obituary. The phone in Linden still takes messages and e-mails do not come back as undeliverable. But Donald had been reduced to ashes for almost a year without us having any idea. His urn sits at the family's cemetery somewhere in Connecticut. A very lonely death, indeed, and an end that Donald didn't deserve. "Life is getting better and better" was his way of expressing what we all like to believe. We will never know if he truly believed it.

Death of a CPA

No hour was too early for an appointment with Phil. Before rush hour would clog the roads one could slide off the Route 100 ramp onto Furnace Branch Road on the outer edges of what is loosely called Glen Burnie and see the non- descript little concrete structure with the mansard roof surrounded by  storage yards and a school bus yard. The dark M300 Chrysler would already be tucked on the side of the building where Phil had his own little escape hatch, he could almost drive right behind his desk.
I would enter from the front, Monica not yet there, Phil came into view in the back room bouncing around on his rickety chair, piles of files in front of him, at times a take-out breakfast from which he took a bite every now and then. There were brown file boxes all around the room and up an entire wall. Next to the side door hung George Bush, the W President. The back wall next to the window had a picture of the Inner Harbor when it still had sheds and warehouses and a working harbor.

Phil would offer me one of the two chairs on the other side of his desk, one would sink deep down into some broken spring upholstery and watch him  shift papers back and forth and occasionally hammer a few numbers into an old style battery powered calculator printing columns of numbers on a paper roll. His right hand typed the numbers in rapid fire way over there while his blue eyes scanned the spreadsheets in front of him. This blind typing always impressed me, especially when he would rip the results the paper roll, nod and then with a #2 pencil log a new line into the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet would go on top of one of the files, he would shut it, shove to the side, lick an envelope, toss a few errant bits off paper into the bin under the desk until the space immediately in front of him was clear. Then he would look up and say, "show me what you got" and the process would start over.

He would say "this is crazy", or that "it gets worse every year"; that "they don't know what they are doing over there", meaning presumably the IRS or the government altogether, especially when it was Democratic. He would report from another training course in which yet another set of rules were explained and how crazy it all was, especially the feds. For the State he had "this girl". He would call her out of the blue, rattle off the tax number, and even protracted issues would be resolved in seconds. I could see that the more local government had somehow a human side and that Phil worked this angle well.

Phil may have had highfalutin clients, but mostly I picture plumbers, glazing company owners and car repair shop owners sitting on those broken springs, folks who hated to pay taxes and for whom Phil was the God that made them go away, or at least seem smaller. "Monica, give me that file!" he would bark when Monica showed up at 8:30 sharp, or "where is this and that" and Monica would magically find things in the organized chaos, and Phil clearly expected she would. Monica was sufficiently no-nonsense to not expect praise or much warmth. The efficiency was like what happens at dental surgery when the assistant wordlessly hands the tools to the surgeon.

Phil loved efficiency. For a while he used a phone ear-peace and had some automated gizmo that lifted the receiver of his old land line phone so he could speak the hasty and breathless "ya, Phil Fewster" without taking his eyes of the charts or the fingers of the calculator. A caller greeted this way would immediately be on alert not to waste any precious time. For all the efficiency, though, he would find time to ask how business was, complain about the stupidity of government, talk about good real estate deals in Ocean City or some trip he made. Or how well his son did who didn't want to work in his office but did more lucrative things. Usually he would conclude the chat with "its crazy" and resort back to the numbers. We couldn't talk about politics, we were worlds apart and he would get way too excited. I had been worried about him getting a heart attack for almost all the 25 years I knew him. How could he possibly keep up this much pressure? Back in my office I found myself copying his moves when sorting through stuff on my desk, including his habit of running the hands through his hair until he looked as ruffled as his desk.

This went on quarterly after quarterly for 25 years, from the office where one had to climb up to on wooden exterior stairs in downtown Glen Burnie, to the one on Rose Anne Road. Phil was part of my routine and my business and in between enough glimpses of Phil the father, the husband and the human seeped through to make his sudden departure much more than a tax catastrophe. It lifted the curtain on the human condition and represented a loss quite close to home, because, really, a friend has left.