A Tardy Farewell

I received a note today in the mail informing me that an important person in my life died last summer, June 20, 2005. His name was Sal Mennuti. The note came from his sister Josephine whom I never met although she and Sal were very close. Sal lived in a small town called Humboldt, about 100 miles north of Phoenix. I happened to be up in Flagstaff the other day for work and after a refreshing walk in the woods I headed back down the hill. As I approached the Prescott exit along I-17, twilight was all but gone and darkness was pooling over the hills I recognized so well. It's in those low hills that little Humboldt sits. I thought about Sal and wondered if all was well with him. I had written him a letter the previous week and still had not heard back from him. Not only was Sal my only friend with whom I could still exchange hand written letters, he was always very prompt in responding. In years past, I would have pulled off of I-17 at the Prescott exit and rolled through those lazy, undulating hills until I saw the Exxon station which meant that I was at Main Street. Main Street in Humboldt is a very short drive and then you're onto dirt roads. Sal's house was always open and I'd come to know his dogs, different ones over the years, through my visits. My favorites were the mother/daughter tandem of Anna and Tasha, although Anna, a very large and heavy dog (try to imagine a kanine version of an Italian grandmother) had a rather discomfiting habit of shoving her nose forcefully into crotches. She had a skin problem that caused her nose to itch and that was her way of finding relief. I have to give props to Snitter, too, a little rat terrier and the first dog of Sal's I met. Snitter was one of his favorites, too. He rescued her from the pound. Snitter was a little skiddish because she had been abused. Both of her front legs were permanently bent because a previous owner had broken them. Sal's dogs meant a lot to him because they were the only immediate "family" he had. He was always seeking out the ones from the pound with a past history of abuse.

Over the years, my spontaneous stops in Humboldt decreased because Sal was rarely home. I'd roam through his empty, hopelessly messy, constantly under construction house always ending up in his library. I'd peruse the shelves a while, then leave a note and go. The other day, as I passed under the large green sign pointing the way toward Humboldt, I was tempted to follow. It had been over a year since I last saw Sal. But it was dark and I wanted to get home with enough of the night left to get some work done. So I continued on to Phoenix, only wondering at his slow response.

Humboldt was more than a place where a friend lived. It became a sort of personal retreat for me. Sal moved up there from Phoenix a little more than a decade ago. He was fed up with city life in Phoenix. Humboldt is tiny and unremarkable, except to the people who live there. But something about the place was special to me. I did a lot of soul searching up there over the years, walking along the dirt roads and out across the hills, maybe into the Agua Fria riverbed, or over to the old smokestack and furnace whose skeletal remains stand as a memorial to the mining days when Humboldt was booming, or sometimes I'd sit in the middle of a field on the remains of a concrete staircase that led up to what was once the schoolhouse where the miners children were educated. Only those few steps remain. I especially liked it in winter; sometimes snow on the ground, the crisp, clean early morning air. In the evenings, I liked walking down the dirt road from Sal's house to a field where someone kept their horses. In the winter, I enjoyed watching plumes of vapor billowing out of their large nostrils, or seeing them shake the early morning frost from their manes. At night, millions of stars were visisble. Mostly, I just liked the quiet. I went there to be quiet. A rooster crowing here, a dog barking there once or twice, a horse winnying or stomping its hoof on the turf. It reminded me of Longfellow's poem My Cathedral:

Like two cathedral towers these stately pines
Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones;
The arch beneath them is not built with stones;
Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines,
And carved this graceful arabesque of vines;
No organ but the wind here sighs and moans,
No sepulchre conceals a martyr's bones,
No marble bishop on his tomb reclines.
Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves,
Gives back a softened echo to thy tread!
Listen! the choir is singing; all the birds,
In leafy galleries beneath the eaves,
Are singing! listen, ere the sound be fled,
And learn there may be worship without words.

Humboldt is a place I'd go to hear creation praying, to hear it proclaim, as Augustine noted, that it was made. I didn't know it then, but I was searching for God. I only shared Humboldt with two people. The first a girl from Texas I'd met along the French Riviera during my wanderings through Europe. We took a long walk at twilight and ended up in a starry, starry night alongside the cool running water of the Agua Fria which has its spring in Humboldt. It's dry by the time you get to Phoenix. We sat there with our feet in the water and talked a good while about life and dreams. The other was a girl I dated for a while. Instead of star-gazing we argued. The first of many. It disturbed the peace of the place. I doubt either of these women understood the secret I was letting them in on. For the most part, I kept Humboldt to myself. Sal and I would usually catch a movie, or if the Arizona Shakespeare Company was performing, we'd take in a play or two. Sal was a man with many hats. At 67, he still only needed four or five hours of sleep a day. That was true for the nearly 20 years I knew him. When he moved to Humboldt, he decidedd he wanted to be an R.N. He was always learning something new and excelling at it. He got his R.N. degree and took a job at the VA hospital, the graveyard shift. He'd sleep from 7:00/7:30 - 11:00 then get up at go to the VA. He did this for nearly a decade. After his night shift, if school was in session he'd head off to one of his teaching jobs, either his Latin class at the tri-city prep school in Prescott Valley or his Spanish or Italian class at Yavapai college. He spent Saturday afternoons taking care of an old, homebound woman in Humboldt. He was the director of two book groups that met twice a month which meant he was reading at least one book a week. He was an actor, and landowner. We used to joke that Humboldt was going to change its name to Mennutiville because he kept buying up the property. He had a love for languages and contined to learn. In addition to Spanish, Italian, and Latin, Sal also knew ancient Greek. Most recently, he'd been studying Hebrew with a local rabbi. He also studied music. He learned to play the piano and a few years ago he began learning how to play the recorder. He kept it in an old tube sock.

Sal was also a homosexual. I didn't know this when I met him at the Arizona Country Club in 1988. I was 20 and I had just returned from a futile attempt at education at the University of Arizona. Cynical and jaded, I took a job at the club bussing tables. Sal worked as a waiter and bartender, just for something to do. He was also teaching part-time at Arizona State then. He was always working. Sal must have been about 49 or 50 at this time. There was nothing about him to indicate he was gay. I was drawn to him simply because he was the only really alive person I had ever met in my life. Till his death, he remained the most alive person I knew. I began engaging him in conversation because it became apparent to me that he had something I wanted and lacked - knowledge and charisma. I was a shy, withdrawn, melancholy, brooding young man who was apt to spend his off hours locked up alone in his room writing angst filled poetry on subjects like death, or the cosmos, or the inadequacy of human love. Sal turned all of that on its head. Here was a man whose very being was a constant, resounding Yes! to life. By his mere presence, he took all of my pseudo-profundity and self-pity and threw it back in my face showing me what a hoax I was. Sal had been a Fulbright scholar as a college student and graduated at the top of his class. He introduced me to something I'd never heard of before - the Classics. The first book he gave me was a worn copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh. It still stands on my bookshelf next to the other great poets of antiquity that Sal introduced me to; Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, et al. And then, of course, there was Shakespeare. I still remember his mock disgust with me whenever he asked me if I'd read this or that book. I always answered no because, at that point, I hadn't read any books. It was all new and fascinating.

It became clear to me that my coworkers were making jokes about me in connection to Sal. Sal never came right out and told me he was gay but he didn't rebut the jokes and comments. He let them have their infantile fun. Sal was the only homosexual I've known personally. Somehow it didn't matter. He wasn't a gay rights activist, he never seemed to be part of that subculture, he never made any sort of advance toward me and, as far as I know, he wasn't sexually active when I knew him. We had a de facto "don't ask, don't tell" policy long before Bill Clinton. I just wanted to hear about the next great poet I should read. There was only one time when Sal told me a little about this part of himself. He initially wanted to be a priest but it was while attending a prep school for boys he began to realize he had inordinate desires. He tried to fight it. In those days, the understanding was that the mere condition of having homosexual desires meant you were living in mortal sin. With that understanding, the priesthood was impossible. The struggle continued into college. He chased girls, maybe had sex with them, even got engaged at one point, if memory serves. Finally, he couldn't handle it anymore. At the top of his class with only his dissertatin to complete for his Ph.D, Sal dropped out to come to grips with this problem. A lot of alcohol was invovled. Finally, he admitted he was gay. I remember him saying that even at age 50, he was still learning to accept himself. That was the only time he talked about it. The jokes contined at work but I didn't care. The people we worked with were bitter and cynical. Their hearts were hard and their minds were dead. For the first time in my life, I had met someone who was really alive and I wanted to know the secret. He was so full of vitality and energy and a joy that was as irrepressible as bubbles in champagne. He was everything I was not and wanted to be, except for the gay part. While all the other waiters, cooks and dishwashers were drudging joylessly through their day, Sal would come gliding into the kitchen reciting some lines of Shakespeare or singing some showtune or other at the top of his lungs. The whole crew either scoffed or laughed at him like he was crazy. He answered them with his cheery grin that seemed ever on his face and a spark in his eyes that I can still see. And off he'd go again, never weighed down by the mediocrity surrounding him. He somehow managed to fly above all the brokenness of the world. I can still hear him quoting Thoreau's famous lines from Walden, very dramatically, of course, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately....I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life." The degenerate morons we worked with sneered sardonically, applying their own perverted interpretations to Sal's words. I had no idea what he was talking about. I had never heard of Thoreau or Walden. But Sal's presentation of those words set my heart alight. "I want that, too!" something in me said. "How do I do it?"

Perhaps above all, Sal was a performer. His life was a great drama and he lived it that way. He had done some acting in community theater and sometimes I thought that he really never stopped acting. He was eccentric, too. Back in the country club days, he used to drive an old beat up Volkswagen bug with seats that had no covers, just springs. Instead of buying his own shoes, which he could clearly afford, he would go to the golf shop and take home pairs of discarded golf shoes, take off the spikes, and wear them as loafers. For nearly a decade while working for the VA, I don't think I ever saw Sal wearing anything other than scrubs. All of his towels were VA, too. He was remodelling his house, adding on and creating a home with no interior doors, just arched doorways. But that eccentricity poured into his personality in delightful ways. Sal could light up a room like no one else I've known. The mood always lifted when he came in and dropped down a notch when he left. There was something refreshing, life-affirming about his presence. You just felt good about life after an hour or even 30 minutes with Sal. This quality is probably what made him a great teacher as well. That, and the fact he loved to teach.

Sal's other great quality was being in the moment. The past was unchangeable and gone and the future was unknowable. He wasn't irresponsible, quite the contrary. But there was really no other time but now for Sal. It was for this reason it was great fun watching Shakespeare with him. If the performance was a comedy, his laughter would rise above the rest of the crowd. Sometimes he was the only one to get the joke. During a drama, there were several "Huh's!" and "Oh, my's" and "Uh-oh's" said aloud. He was always completely into whatever he was doing, always deep in the event of the moment.

The second book Sal gave me was Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain. A paperback copy even more tattered than Gilgamesh. I still have this book, too. It now needs a rubber band to hold it together but I keep it because it's important to remember our beginnings. This was the beginning of my search for God. Seven Story Mountain made a great impression on me then although my taste for Merton has decreased as I've grown older. I think Sal knew I was searching and placed some signposts along the way. But we never talked seriously about God, at least not that I remember. That was too bad. We went to mass together once in Humboldt in a little building that used to be the bank. Last I saw, it had changed into a Protestant church of some kind. I wish I knew Sal's thoughts about God. I think he knew I underwent a conversion of some sort during the time we knew each other but he never asked about my thoughts or beliefs either. We pretty much stayed on literature and how important it is to "Gather, ye, rosebuds while ye may." He was constantly telling me that. He was the greatest example I've known of St. Irenaus's claim that "the glory of God is man fully alive."

Early on in our friendship, I gave Sal the nickname "Mentor." And he, in turn, called me his "student." Over the years, right up until our last correspondence last year, we continued to address each other and sign our letters this way. The student never overtook the mentor but I gained much ground. In recent years, I could cite books and writers with whom he was unfamiliar. I used such opportunities to rib Sal as he used to rib me, feigning disgust when he didn't know the book I was talking about. But he was always my mentor. I learned more than he probably ever knew because of our meeting in the most inauspicious of places in 1988. He planted a seed that grew and bore much fruit in my life. It's not the kind of fruit that many people value, or even see. But I do. And I will be eternally grateful because it was Sal's inspiration, his love for life that showed me the difference between living and merely existing and it was his tutelage that led me to the University of Dallas where my life of the mind deepened and became a life of the soul. Thoreau also wrote the following in Walden:

"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are...The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse...Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage...Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society."

This, I think describes Sal's philosophy of life pretty well. He was not poor but he lived liked it. I don't think I ever saw Sal wearing any item of clothing that was new, in 20 years. His house was modest, and hopelessly dusty. The only new thing I know of that Sal ever owned was a Jeep he bought three or four years ago. He owned 12 or 13 houses in Humboldt and rented them all out for $300/month. That's all he would charge his tenants. He knew he would never make his money back on those properties at that rate. In some cases, he exchanged labor for rent. One of his tenants was a carpenter who was having trouble making rent. So Sal put him to work building the additions on his small house in lieu of rent money. This is why the work was taking so long. And Sal certainly never lacked society. Everyone in Humboldt knew him, and many in Prescott.

My last correspondence with Sal was in the Spring of 2005. He invited me up as usual. It had been a long time since I'd been to my "retreat." A long time since I had roamed around that quiet little town. A long time since I had heard Sal's laughter and shared a meal of pasta and Italian sausage with him in his dimly lit, half completed kitchen. A long time since I walked through that front door, always unlocked, with an old sock stuffed into the hole where a deadbolt used to be. With a hot Phoenix summer coming, a weekend in Humboldt sounded good. But part of it frightened me. There were things I knew I needed to think about that I didn't want to think about. And Humboldt was a place for thinking. So I busied myself with distractions and I didn't go. Now I wish I had. I also wish Sal had written to me when he knew he was ill. His sister Josephine wrote in her note that Sal died of cancer. She and her husband were with him through his decline and death. I'm glad about that. But I wish he would have contacted me. I wish I could have looked on his face once more, his face that seemed hardly changed with age, a face that always shone with a resounding Yes! to life. I wish I could have wandered through his chaotic, half-finished house with no interior doors. I wish I could have scanned the dusty shelves of his library one last time. I wish I could have said good-bye, and thanks. Thanks for being really alive. Thanks for embracing life and living it dramatically. Thanks for being your own man and showing me what truly counts. Thanks for encouraging me to pursue my dream, and to care less about what others think. Thanks for teaching me what good books are. Because of you, I've got shelves full of them. Farewell, my friend, my mentor. I will miss you.

Requiescat Louis "Sal" Mennuti
May your voice be heard with the choirs of heaven.