DIED 2017
YEARS AGO, A STUDENT in my journalism class chose an interesting Baltimorean for her profile assignment. A guy whose passion for social justice had led him through career number one, criminal law, to career number two, public health, to career number three, Importer of Magnificent Treasures and Patron Saint of Nepalese Villages, to career number four, dress designer. On a soul-searching global sabbatical in his early forties, he’d had a vision: a store that would sell crafts produced by third-world people, funneling its profits back to their villages to fund schools. By the mid-1990s, he’d made that happen; even more successfully, he developed a line of women’s clothing made from handmade textiles. His shop in downtown Baltimore had a reputation not just for fine merchandise but also for uncanny powers of mood enhancement. Half the time people come in here just to cheer up, one of the employees told my cub reporter.
Years later, after I moved to Baltimore, I met a pair of twins at my daughter’s elementary school, then realized this man was their father. I saw him most often in the summer at our neighborhood pool, tall and lean, with dark curly hair and a great, lopsided nose, swimming what seemed like hundreds of laps each morning. For some reason, my social anxiety is at its worst at the pool, where I make a beeline to a chair, stick my head in my book, and never speak to anyone. He was the only person not put off by my wall of bad vibes, stopping each day to say hello. He had a joyous smile that involved his whole face, his warm brown eyes and thick brows seeming to acknowledge that there are many reasons not to smile and we know that, but let’s smile anyway.
He was seventy but looked fifty when he died in a motorcycle accident in Nepal, a bad one in the middle of nowhere, or his remarkable vigor might have pulled him through. According to the slide show we watched at his memorial, the man simply could not be caught without a smile on his face, from his bar mitzvah in Brooklyn on out. And as brokenhearted as his mourners may have been, no one could speak of him without giving in to the urge, even his wife. Think of what he would want to happen, she said, and see that it does.