Be Delightful

Remembering Bob on his 96th Birth Anniversary

(Photo Copyright 2017 Wyatt McSpadden)

NOTE: Today is the 96th birth anniversary of Bob, my platonic soulmate, my late in life Good Father, my best friend. We only had fourteen months together living at the ranch, but dang, what a time that was. Today I offer an excerpt from my book The Tao of Bob. I hope you find some time today to be delightful and be delighted in honor of Bob.

Many years ago, I adopted a motto to live by: Be Delightful. You don't even need to read studies, though they exist, about the boomerang effect of bringing joy to others. Try it yourself and get immediate results. This can be as simple as smiling at a stranger, who almost always will smile back, which elevates good brain chemistry for both of you. Mostly though, it's just fun to be delightful. This is one reason why I, introvert, nevertheless engage strangers in conversation. I really want to know how my grocery store cashier is doing. I really want a passerby to know her dress is cute. I really take joy in retrieving a dropped toy from the ground, handing it back to the carriage-bound toddler that tossed it along with a few gurgling sounds and a goofy face as I do.

Bob is the picture of Be Delightful every day. He is super consistent. He laughs a lot. He makes me laugh a lot. Listening to stories of the challenges he endured in his long life, especially the last couple of years before moving to the ranch, I understand that he once reached a point of not being able to be delightful for some time. His delightfulness had not entirely left him, but rather gone dark when pushed up against long days in a nursing home watching his wife slowly slip away.

Ranch life brings back the delight. I need look no further than his giddy demeanor to verify this, but further evidence exists. I am in the habit of following Bob around with my phone, snapping pictures of him on his lawnmower, with the horses, eating the occasional hearty meal, playing checkers. There is a Benjamin Button quality to this collection, and his increasingly healthy glow is due to more than just the Texas sun. Running the ranch breathes new life into him. He didn’t look a day over eighty when he arrived. Now he appears closer to seventy. “I feel more alive than I did when I was twenty-one,” he tells me, often.

He cannot resist being silly. One day, while I am hosting a summer writing camp for kids in the barn, the door swings open unexpectedly. In saunters Bob, face masked by a bandana like some movie bandito. Wielding a Nerf gun, he swaggers over to my pleasantly confused charges, teenagers clearly not accustomed to having an old prankster in their midst. “Put ‘em up!” says Bob, and laughs and laughs, prompting the same in the kids.

More silliness shows up as a truly delightful side effect of trying to ease the Bob’s neuropathy symptoms, to alleviate the severity of the burning in his legs and feet, by introducing him to the wonders of THC. Marijuana has changed drastically over the past couple of decades, with different strains providing different effects. With legalization occurring across a growing number of states, so is acceptance that this is not a mere recreational drug, but a natural plant with plenty of medicinal benefits.

Alcohol having been my preferred poison, I never was a big fan of weed, mostly because when I do experiment, each time I confirm this truth: I am a lousy stoner. I get stupid, slurry, sleepy, tongue-tied. During my time with Peter, though, I take to smoking a little. At first, I resist when he offers me tokes on the joints he smokes throughout the day. My refusal is in large part due to my aforementioned lightweight reaction to the stuff. Also, having quit drinking in my thirties, I wonder if getting high might count as some black mark against my sobriety. Eventually, I loosen up and partake, come to enjoy how it slows me down. Do I rationalize using marijuana to have a shared interest with Peter or am I pursuing a means of innocent relaxation? Quite possibly both. Slowly my resistance builds and I make up my mind that a few evening tokes are not a bad thing at all.

Though initially discreet around Bob, I ascertain fairly quickly he has no opposition to my usage. When I mention pot, he doesn’t recoil, lecture, or even seem to care. Instead he expresses curiosity, and recounts a workday in his youth when he and some friends drank some of his homemade cherry wine during lunch. Over-fermentation or some other alchemical reaction caused a hallucinogenic effects. “I kept trying to pull my hand off like a glove,” he says, grinning and reenacting that day, holding up his arm, pretending to peel off his fingers.

Armed with the knowledge that at some point in his life he enjoyed mind-altering activities—even if it was just once and a half-century prior—I half-jokingly leave a joint out on the table for him one day. It disappears. Eventually he tells me he smoked it. And enjoyed it.

His admission leads me to some conversations with a friend who uses THC to control severe chronic pain, an alternative to the opioids big pharma is so fond of getting people hooked on. My friend assures me that Bob, too, will notice positive results if he starts using some form of marijuana regularly. Bob says he’s game and so we begin experimenting to figure out the best delivery system for an octogenarian.

Toking weed doesn’t serve him well, given the COPD he developed after smoking cigarettes for decades, a habit he started at age eight and likes to say he “quit cold turkey during open heart surgery.” Edibles are a little too dicey, with the potential for an unpredictably strong hit that could last hours and be accompanied by an uncomfortable sort of paralysis, with a top note of paranoia. An oil pen is relatively to his liking, but still not easy enough on the lungs. Ultimately, we go with capsules, coming up with just the right dosage to ease some of his discomfort without making him too loopy.    

A little leery to embark on this adventure when the rubber actually hits the road and I present him with the first batch, he agrees to try when I, gesturing to our supply, say I’ll gladly take one for the team. Observing me send a pot pill down the hatch, emboldened he follows suit. Within a half-hour we are both insisting the pills have very little effect. “This Mary Jane ain’t doing nothing,” Bob says, although a video of our maiden voyage—which thankfully does not exist—might inspire a different opinion in anyone viewing it, as we sit and giggle and giggle, losing our place in the conversation repeatedly, neither of us at first making the connection between our happy pill party and my sudden need to dash off to the kitchen to procure the crunchiest, saltiest snacks I can forage to sate appetites that have sprung up from nowhere.

We’re hardly Cheech and Chong, but we do enjoy our happy hours, getting a little evening buzz on, and watching a TV station Bob stumbled on, which seemingly only plays movies featuring either Elvis Presley or Diana Ross. He, in his La-Z-Boy, leaning back as the burn in his legs and feet quiets. Me, sitting on his bed, knitting very, very slowly, aware that my altered state makes me more mistake-prone.

One night, when we opt for playing stoned checkers over stoned watching Mahogany for the twelfth time, something seems off. Either we have again forgotten to eat, or I have managed to pull from our hiding place not one but two “supplements” which, we soon find out, hold a heavier THC dose than that to which we have grown accustomed. Whatever resistance we have built up is no match for the sudden confusion that engulfs us.

In mere moments we transform from relatively cognizant human beings to space aliens obliterated out of our minds, our once familiar surroundings suddenly having morphed into a strange new planet. We sit across from each other, perched on the edge of his bed, staring obliviously, admiring the beautiful pattern of the checkers board resting between us. We have forgotten entirely how the game works, looking at the black and white disks for clues, unsure whose turn it is. Comfortably numb is an understatement. We try to speak. We cannot stop giggling. An urgent need to sleep washes over me. I tell Bob I have to go, but not before I help him to his feet, so he can go to the bathroom, take out his teeth and don his pajamas. I want to monitor him until he is safely beneath the covers because it’s all fun and games until a near-ninety-year-old falls on his skinny stoned butt and breaks a hip.

Bob continues to laugh uproariously. “Help me!” he says and reaches his arms out. As soon as I take them, he purposefully transforms himself into rubber and melts backwards toward the mattress, disallowing me to gain purchase. He laughs louder. I can’t pull him to his feet. Or rather, he won’t let me. Like a little child that never wearies of Peek-a-Boo, again he says, “Help me!” Again he turns to rubber when I try, his laughter now maniacal.

These buzzy times, I take in the picture of us chilling out, cracking each other up. I joke that we should rename the place Pippi Longstocking Ranch, the way we indulge ourselves when the workday is done, acting like children who’ve been left alone to our own devices, ecstatic that no one is the boss of us, deriving added satisfaction from breaking rules leftover from our past lives: You shouldn’t smoke weed! You shouldn’t watch too much TV! You should be using this time productively!

Bob’s delightful antics infuse me with still more healing and, as I heal, I resume being delightful to others, something I have mostly lost the ability to do as back-to-back Peter-fueled depressions and breakup trauma consumes me. No more scowling in the grocery store or ignoring toy-hurling, babbling babies, as I have come to do in my despondency. I wake up a little more each day to small joys all around me. Bob watches me emerge with pleasure. He never frames it as such, but sometimes I think my broken heart is the biggest restoration project he has ever undertaken. He seems just fine with that, stripping away my layers of sadness, self-doubt, and self-criticism, leading me slowly back to my happy pre-Peter self.

NOTES: Wow Y’all! There’s been a big uptick in overall subscribers and a nice jump in paid subscribers. I can’t thank you enough for your support. Please know that when you contribute $5 monthly or $50 per year, it helps me A LOT. If you’re not down with paying, you can still help by sharing this with others you think will dig it. THANK YOU.

Other ways to help—One Time Tips gratefully accepted via Venmo: @spike-gillespie. You can buy my hilarious new novel, Grok This, Bitch. $10 for an e-copy, $30 for a print copy (postage and handling included). Just Venmo me and I’ll ship right away.

This week, in honor of Bob’s birthday, I’m offering e-copies of The Tao of Bob for a mere $5. And, if you sign up as a monthly paid subscriber, I’ll send you an e-book for free. I think I have a couple of print copies around so if you prefer print, let me know and we’ll figure it out. If you’re already a paid subscriber and want a free e-copy, just message me your email address.

My next FREE Memoir Writing Workshop at Hampton Branch Library in Oak Hill is on Tuesday November 19, 5:30-7:30 pm. It always fills to capacity so if you want a spot, please REGISTER HERE.

Want more Bob? Here’s a story that ran in The Statesman.

Here’s a beautiful piece Bob’s daughter Ellen—my sister from another mister—wrote.

And here’s a radio interview with Ellen, Bob and me that aired on Austin’s NPR affiliate KUT via The Texas Standard. It aired just after Bob died.