Rather than meet at a bar with all the noise, bustle, and distractions, a few of us retired guys prefer to meet on the terrace every week. I call it the terrace because it’s above street level. It’s covered with a shade tarp underneath which I set out folding tables and chairs. The other guys just call it the driveway.
I refer to these gatherings as the Tea Party because we drink teas from all over the world. Some favor tea from India, Sri Lanka, China, or Kenya. Others prefer tea from Scotland, Mexico, Poland, or Tennessee – whatever floats their cubes.
There’s no requirement to reply to my weekly invitations. An hour before it starts is the best time to decide if one is in the mood. Usually about a dozen folks appear, but we’ve had as many as 26, and as few as seven. Regardless, it’s always a pleasant time (top photo).
The subjects of discussion can be anything: audio, concerts, motorcycling, religion, politics, personal experiences, philosophy, relationships, or hearsay. It doesn’t matter, so long as it’s done without interrupting others or hogging the floor. Those who cop an attitude of intellectual or moral superiority soon find themselves disinvited – which always improves the overall quality of conversation.
Over the years, we’ve gathered a compatible group of regulars. Although we don’t all think alike, we respect and appreciate each other. In SoCal, where most everyone’s relatives live elsewhere, this is as close as we get to a family reunion, so it’s not surprising that many of us have developed close bonds.
Rick has been a regular for years (above, left side standing), but he failed to show at the last Tea Party. As he usually contacts us if he can’t make it, Lady Di (my wife) was concerned and asked me to reach out, so I sent him an e-mail. He didn’t get back to me right away but that was not unusual.
When he still hadn’t responded a couple of days later, I got alarmed. I phoned him, no answer. I left messages, no response. By 10:30, I told Di I was going to visit his house.
“I’m coming with you,” she said.
Rick lives in an 835 square foot, free-standing house. Numerous tiny beach houses were built in SoCal in the 1930s, and most have been renovated or replaced. But for Rick, this place was perfect as constructed. When he lived as a hippie, he learned that he didn’t need much to be happy.
He placed a pair of PSB speakers in his tiny living room and they sounded surprisingly good for such a small, overstuffed space. He often played bootleg tapes which he’d made at the many rock concerts he'd attended in San Francisco before the artists became big stars (he said he’d smoked dope with Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead). He was in the process of transferring them to digital media so we could play them at home.
There's a single-car garage attached to his house where he kept his ’34 Ford hot rod. He was very proud of the fact that it had an original, all metal body – no fiberglass replacements. He asked me to accompany him when he first went to check it out. He was so excited.
At the back of his large yard, there’s a freestanding double-car garage which can be accessed from the alley. That’s where his workshop and motorcycles were located.
He enjoyed making unique creations in both metal and wood. As a big fan of Comic-Con, he was inspired to make a replica ray gun, which he brought to a Tea Party one day as a show and tell. The attention to detail was impressive.
Every year since 2012, he hosted a one-day rally that he farcically called the “Alley of Death.” He’d rope off the alley behind his house and conduct skill-riding contests. It was really just an excuse to socialize with friends, but everyone was willing to attend and participate. He’d set pop ups, tables, and chairs for about 35 people in his back yard and never had any trouble filling them. It was always a fun time. Slow race contestant Joe (below, in the Death Valley T-shirt) is a Tea Party regular.
Lady Di and I got to Rick’s place at about 11 that morning to find packages and mail piled up on the front porch. That was an ominous sign. We knocked at the front door, then every door and window in the house. No response. We opened the side door to the garage to find his hot rod inside, and his Prius was parked out front. His bedroom windows were open, but we could see through the screens that he wasn’t in his bed.
So we called 911 and asked for an officer to come over to break in. They said they’d send an officer right away. After an hour of waiting in the driveway, no one showed and I found myself wondering if the idea of defunding the police was a good idea.
Lady Di was getting very anxious, so I suggested we walk to the bar on the other side of the alley for a beer. She related our concerns to the bar staff. They all knew and liked Rick, and had even socialized with him on his back patio. They didn’t charge us for the beer and asked us to let them know what we found out.
When we got back, a neighbor lady to whom we'd spoken before suggested we shouldn’t wait any longer and just break in. She removed the bedroom screen, slipped in through the small window, and opened the back door. We looked around the place but didn’t see him.
Then Di asked me to check the bathroom. We were all trying to avoid the only closed door in the house. It would open only six inches before jamming, but the smell and flies indicated that there was a problem. We called 911 again and reported a dead body. This time, they appeared in 10 minutes with the fire truck and ambulance in tow.
The police pushed through the bathroom door and discovered Rick’s body. They had a lot of questions for us, made many notes, and as we left, said they’d call us when they have the coroner's report.
A few days later, his daughter-in-law called us to reveal he'd died of natural causes related to his Type 1 diabetes.
He often said that he never expected to live long, as that’s what he was told as a kid, but he made it to age 78.
It took us a while to believe that he was really gone. We drove home in stunned silence. As the song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
We’re going to miss Rick. The Tea Parties on the terrace won’t be the same without him. I guess he’ll never again host the “Alley of Death.” The vodka tasting he had planned on his back porch isn't going to happen either. We’ll never get to hear digital copies of his bootleg recordings on our home systems.
We discussed Rick’s memory at the next Tea Party. Someone said that Rick didn’t believe that life was a journey; he saw it as a symphony. He believed that its purpose is not to reach a destination, but to savor every note.
We all agreed that he'd savored every note.
