Howard

Howard is perhaps at the far extreme of John. His background is a little more complicated, so I need to go back a generation to explain it. Howard's father was an engineer who emigrated from Germany and settled in Detroit, where he worked for the Ford motor company. Having few friends in a strange city, he became heavily involved with his church and through it met his first wife, the daughter of its pastor. All five of the pastor's daughters had been raised in a kind of fundamentalist bubble, and according to Howard, they were a very strange group. The daughter who married Howard's father, it seems, was the most unstable. For many years the truth about her was hidden from Howard, but he finally learned she'd hung herself.

After her death, his father moved to Columbus, where he met a much younger woman who'd left a defunct coal-mining town in Appalachia to find a better life in a more prosperous city. They married, and shortly afterward Howard was born. But a happy family life was not in the cards. When Howard was three, his mother was paralyzed in a car accident. She lived almost ten years in a vegetative state, leaving Howard's father, now in his fifties, to raise their son alone. Even that relative stability didn't last long; just a few years after his mother died, Howard's father succumbed to pneumonia––his will to live perhaps compromised by the twin tragedies of his life. Fortunately, he'd chosen guardians wisely, enabling Howard to spend the remainder of his high school years in a stable and loving home, up until the time he shipped off for college.

Being gifted in his own right and having been raised by an older, highly intelligent man, Howard was a brilliant student. To this day you can have a discussion with him on almost any subject in which you think you're an expert––history, psychology, literature, physics, astronomy, computers, or the operation of a business—and he'll probably know more about it than you do. In college, we had many a beer-befuddled conversation in which he twisted my mind into a tangle of knots, some of which I'm still trying to untie. (Among them was the argument that reality is so deep and multi-faceted, that no matter what you see in it, you're guaranteed to find it there, which makes the notion of an objective reality meaningless.)

It was Howard who introduced me to William James, Karl Jung, Will Durant, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky (whom I read while neglecting my classroom assignments). Many times I think I should have paid my tuition to Howard instead of the college; I owe my lifelong passion for learning more to him than I do to any of the professors I had.

In spite of his erudition, Howard was no dust-covered tome lacking a sense of humor or irony. One Halloween night he charcoaled a beard on his chin and planted two garishly painted paper sacks on his shoulders, which he dubbed Son and Holy Ghost, making him that most absurd of theological contradictions, the Holy Trinity. He also played rugby his senior year, and on several occasions drank me under the table (no small feat in those days). On one occasion (St. Olaf being a good religious school), he decided that he and I should drink a pitcher of beer for each of the 12 tribes of Israel. I tossed my suds at Simeon, leaving Howard to down Zebulun by himself.

After college, Howard found his way into adult life without much difficulty. He landed a real job with a good salary and benefits while I was still struggling to graduate. Not long after that, he was accepted to the Wharton School of business, and before I knew it, had landed a consulting job in Texas. There he met his wife and began raising a family. We lost touch for nearly a decade, but I was happy to get a phone call four or five years ago when he came through Minneapolis. We had dinner at my house, and he told me about his wife, his three children, and his job programming accounting models for different businesses. At the same time, I was saddened to learn that a few years back he'd lost an infant son, born with a heart defect.

To this day, Howard remains the most risk-avoidant of the three of us, a quality that sometimes bothers him, but he says that given his past, his natural reaction is to think that whenever you take a risk, bad things will happen to you. His experience is just the opposite of John's and mine, both of us lucky, stupid fools with more near-death experiences than a one-arm trapeze artist. Howard strangely confessed to being a touch envious of those experiences, but I told him that when your life's in the balance, the only thing you feel is a sickening redline fear that the motor's about to blow up underneath you, and there's nothing sexy or romantic about reliving those experiences to the point your palms sweat. No, I think Howard has a wonderful life as a successful businessman and family man, and I don't think he needs to be jealous of anyone.

Next time, me.