A tale of my friend Bob and his spiritual influence on my life
Taoism is a philosophical tradition that emphasizes living in harmony with the Tao, often defined as “the way” and is described as something that is both the source of, and the force behind, everything that exists. When you break it down, that pretty much describes the life of my friend Bob, otherwise known as “Boob,” even though he doesn’t even probably realize it. Don’t get me wrong, he knows we call him Boob, he just doesn’t think of himself as a Taoist. He just is.
Bob is not what I would consider a particularly religious man, although I would say that he’s oddly spiritual. Not in a nutty-crunchy sort of way, even though he spent a lot of time living a rather hippie lifestyle, but more of a c’est la vie sort of way of resigning oneself to the fact that often life offers you lemons and if you want to be happy, you better learn how to make lemonade.
Bob is an incurable optimist. Despite a life of hard work, disappointments, bad luck, and difficult circumstances, Bob expects things to simply work out. Bob has disappointments like everyone else. He gets scared and angry and irritated and sad. But compared to most people, this is largely ephemeral.
Bob has enormous resilience. Not just physically, which is undoubtedly true, but I’ve often said that out of everyone I know, or have ever met for that matter, Bob is the person most likely to make it past 100. He’s 70 but has the energy and stamina of a 16-year-old.
In many ways, Bob is not romantic at all, but oddly practical, or at least practical in the world as he sees it. His worldview, in and of itself, is rarely beneficial in today’s modern society, but once you get to know what makes Bob tick, it makes a lot of sense. It’s an older worldview, possibly older than Bob himself. He’s what we call an old soul.
I first met Bob in 1997 when he was visiting from his home in Washington State. Bob and his wife Donna, along with their three kids, were visiting family in New Jersey. Bob and Donna had been good friends with my wife Jane and her family before I met her. Our kids were all about the same ages, and Bob and I hit it off immediately.
Bob’s story starts in 1956 in Belgium, where he was born in a Catholic convent to a young woman who had found herself pregnant out of wedlock. He spent his first 18 months living there and apparently was quite a hit with the nuns who cared for him. I can only assume he was simply a happy, if not restless, baby.
Meanwhile, in Montauk, Long Island, New York, Doug and Grace Farrington longed for another child after giving birth to a girl, followed by a series of miscarriages.
Doug, along with his father, decided to make the trip to pick Bob up after learning from another American couple that there was a baby that needed to be adopted. He arrived home stinking of cognac and soaked in urine. This was a different time, you understand, and presumably, that was the best the men knew how to do. Give him some booze and let the women worry about the rest when you get home. That had to be some flight.
A few years later, they gave birth to another daughter named Libby, quite unexpectedly.
Montauk is a fishing community, and life at the shore was most likely pretty quiet during the 1960s. Doug was a lawyer. Grace was a homemaker.
From what I gather, Bob was a loving son, but often mischievous. He was kicked out of multiple schools, both public and private. He wasn’t a criminal. He just didn’t see the need for all the rules around him. Bob didn’t just march to the beat of a different drummer. He danced to the swoon of an entire orchestra.
Of course, it probably didn’t hurt that Bob had entered America just as the counterculture was emerging, along with surfing, drugs, and rock and roll. By the time Bob was 17, it was 1973, and he decided it was time to leave home. He was only making everyone anxious, and he determined he’d done his time.
He bought a boat and began living on that, working locally, surfing, and partying with friends.
Eventually, he decided to leave Long Island and set out to hitchhike across the country, occasionally stopping to work as a shrimper, fisherman, carpenter, roofer, and handyman. It was three years before his family heard from him. At first, he felt like he didn’t have anything to tell them, then he felt bad that it had been so long. They didn’t know if he was even alive.
During that time, he hitchhiked across the country back and forth at least several times.
Bob eventually found himself in Santa Cruz, California, where he met his wife, Donna. At some point, they were married and moved back East and lived in Cape May, New Jersey, where they met my wife, Jane. She was married to her ex-husband Rick at the time, and the four of them spent a lot of birthdays, holidays, and legendary camping trips together.
Not long after Ben, their youngest, was born, they moved back to Washington State to be near Donna’s family.
In 1997, I met Jane. She and Rick had split up, and it was that summer that Bob and Donna returned to visit Bob’s mother, Grace, his sister Libby, and her husband, Gary.
Six years later, as promised, The F-Troop, as we all referred to them, loaded everything into a U-Haul and The Beast, an 80s era, steel body Chevy Suburban, and drove across the country to live once again in Cape May, New Jersey. Imagine the Beverly Hillbillies, but coming east.
I might not have everything exactly correct, but that’s how I remember the story. It’s close enough.
Bob is a painter, a house painter, not an artist. Although I think I can make a good argument that this is an art, most of society would describe him as a working man, not an artist.
He drives a beat-up truck of indiscriminate vintage. They occasionally change to a different color or model, but they all share one characteristic. They’re never washed. There is a ladder rack on the back, always with a ladder, and usually with a surfboard.
The bed is full of the flotsam and jetsam of his trade. Old paint buckets, pails, paint brushes, rusty tools, rags, wetsuits, leftover lunch, beer bottles, firewood, and junk he’s trash-picked by the side of the road. The cab of the truck, including the dash, passenger seat, and floor, is full of anything he wants to keep dry or doesn’t want stolen. Most of Bob’s trucks don’t have working air conditioning, and I’ve never seen power windows on any vehicle he drives. A few I’ve had to push to start more than once. But he nurses them along, drives slowly, and does his best to coax the most life out of them that he can muster.
I once wrote a fictional short story based on my friendship with Bob. It might help explain my love for him. You can read it here. It’s a quick read. Other than the fact that Bob is still very much with us, that’s a pretty good record of our relationship once upon a time and one specific day in particular. I’ve also written about my travels with Bob here. There was a time, not so long ago, when he figured quite prominently in my life.
If I wrote Bob as a character in a novel, I don’t think anyone would believe he was real. He would come off sounding like a mythical character, a leprechaun, or another magical creature. A mischievous imp, too smart to work that hard and too hardworking to sit still, but somehow with plenty of free time to do as he pleases. While it’s true I romanticize a bit of his life and give him the benefit of the doubt while overlooking his faults, I maintain that he is a unique and tremendous work of art.
A surfer friend of ours once said that “Bob is just in it for the glide.” He talked about Bob’s propensity to casually float down the line of a wave. He wasn’t trying to be fancy. No crazy cutbacks, airs, or noseriding. He was content to be one with the energy of the wave and let it take him as far as it could. He’d often laugh or holler the whole way. Then he’d paddle out and do it again.
I do believe that helps sum up at least part of Bob’s worldview. Get yourself a few reliable tools and learn how to harness the natural energy of the world around you. If you can figure out how to do that, you’ve got it made. The only thing left is to enjoy the ride. I’ve never met anyone who lived more in the moment, took what life gave him, and laughed at the magnificence of it all. He has never sought fortune or fame. He sees the best in everyone. He gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, and he’s never met a stranger.
Bob goes along for the ride. Sometimes that can seem a little parasitic, but it’s not. He’s just east going. He prefers rum, but if his wife bought gin, then he’s drinking gin. If he doesn’t have a book he picked out, he’ll read one of hers. The number of times I’ve been with him where he has forgotten either his phone, his wallet, or both could fill a book of its own. I honestly don’t know how he gets through the workday, but he manages.
The secret ingredient to Bob’s success, I think, is his charm. He can light up anyone. For years, I got gas at the same gas station every few days and never had more than two words to say to the elderly Sikh man who worked there. I was always friendly, but he was very gruff and reserved. Until the day Bob and I pulled in at the same time, headed in opposite directions. I got out to talk to Bob, but first, he had to rib the station attendant, smacking him on the back and getting him laughing. I’d never even seen this guy smile before. Here he was, Bob’s best friend in another life.
But that is Bob, the man who never met a stranger.
Bob’s charm comes from a few things, I think. One, he is simply preternaturally happy. He’s a glass-half-full kind of guy, with a rum floater. Bob wakes up with a smile on his face and a spring in his step. Why wouldn’t everything work out in his favor? And if not, there’s always a few drinks and a pipe to look forward to. Why stress? It’s all good, dude.
Two, he’s insatiable when it comes to life. He’s very well-read and endlessly curious. He knows a lot about a lot of things but remains completely ignorant of most 21st-century technology. He only upgraded from his flip phone a few years ago, and I guarantee he doesn’t know how to use it. He doesn’t use email, and he’s not on social media. The most modern thing in Bob’s life, besides his truck, is probably his chainsaw.
Three, he enjoys life. That sounds trite, but it’s true. He actually enjoys each day, at least most of each day. He’s not delusional, so much as grateful. He’s very childlike that way. He reminds me more of my three-year-old grandson than anyone I know my age. He just can’t believe we get to do this shit every day.
It would be wrong of me to paint Bob as perfect or saintly. He’s not. I’m sure he has his bad days, and he’s seen hard times. But if ever there was going to be someone to find a silver lining in a shit storm, it’s my pal Bob. He simply sees more upside potential in the day than most.
Part of what I’m most attracted to in Bob is that he’s nothing like me. I’m introverted, and he’s extroverted. I’m a curmudgeon, and he’s an optimist. I’m wrapped up in work, and he’s cutting firewood and surfing. He used to practically pull me out of the house to go surfing or cut wood or whatever. He didn’t often take no for an answer, and for a time, I was grateful for it. Until it got to be too much.
I stopped wanting to get up early and jump into ice-cold water. I stopped wanting to cut my own firewood. I didn’t have the same time and energy to sit around all night drinking with Bob. Frankly, I had other shit to do. It’s the way it goes sometimes. We led different lives. As his wife once said, “Dave showers in the morning, and Bob showers at night.”
I saw the comedian Sebastian Maniscalco talking about being domesticated by his wife. She told him that when he wasn’t smiling, his resting face looked like he wanted to murder you. He compared himself to a cat that had to be coaxed out from under the sofa. I get all of that. If you came to my door, I would likely hide as well.
But it was always Bob who took me out of my shell. When I was with him, I allowed his energy to course through me and lift me up. I was able to ride his wave of good cheer and be present in the moment. You just had to be willing to embrace the glide.
I’m reminded of the story of Eeyore from A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh.” Eeyore, you might remember, is a stuffed donkey whose tail is held on with a nail. He’s also a bit of a pill, to be honest. Not terribly social. Almost morose. Not really all that likable, actually.
But I read this thing (I can’t remember where): That the wonderful thing about Eeyore is that even though he is basically clinically depressed, he still gets invited to participate in adventures and shenanigans with all of his friends. They never expect him to pretend to feel happy. They just love him anyway, and they never leave him behind or ask him to change.
In this scenario, I’m Eyeore. Bob is some cross between Pooh, Owl, and Tigger. He’s thoughtful and wise, childish and rambunctious. Also, I think it’s fair to say that Boobs, like Tiggers, bounce. You need that sometimes.
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