Denver

  Even though it was slightly out of the way I decided to go through Denver on my cross-country trip.   I debated about not going, but it was a good decision.  I was able to reconnect and say good-bye.

When I lived in Denver I couldn’t get a full-time teaching position.  I ended up working in a bar called the Handle Bar and Grill.  It was a weird little restaurant that I love dearly to this day.  I met some of the most interesting, heart-breaking and wonderful people in the world while I was working there.  Many of the regulars at the restaurant became very good friends.  Chad-O was one of these.  He came in most evening to have a drink and unwind from the day.  As we got to know each other better I appreciated him more and more.  The restaurant business is extremely frustrating and I often had rough shifts.  He always had a smile and a joke to bring me out of my misery.  So may times he’d say, “You’ve had a rough week, let me take you out to dinner.”  And we weren’t talking Applebees.  He took me to nice restaurants and bought nice wine and we just would have fun.  It was one of the biggest blessings of that time in my life.  I was routinely treated like dirt by restaurant customers and to have Chad treat me to dinner always made things better.  When Willie Nelson came to Red Rocks I was so sad that I couldn’t afford a ticket and he showed up at the bar one night with 2 tickets.  One for him and one for me.  He started coming to dinners at my house and Brandy and I would go to his house and lay in the hammocks and jump on the trampoline and play horse shoes (he had a great roommate) and he’d be cooking pork tenderloin with crazy cheese plates and again, good wine.  He had a smile all the time and a fantastic laugh.  He was simply a good person. 

I was finishing packing up my apartment in Anchorage on one of my last nights when Brandy called to tell me Chad had had a heart attack that morning and was gone.  I was stunned.  It was incomprehensible to me that he wouldn’t be there anymore.  He’d had a rough couple of years and we hadn’t talked consistently, but whenever we did we were just able to pick up where we’d left off and he always finished the conversation with a positive attitude that things were going to get better.  I’d talked to him just a few weeks before and we’d planned to get together when I went through Denver.  It didn’t seem real that I couldn’t pick up my phone and talk to him.  I had to give up on my packing for the day and I just fell apart.  I got up the next day and went back to business and just moved on.  I had too much on my plate to deal with it.  I just didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with everything all at once.

So I decided to go through Denver.  I arrived at Brandy’s house and we had a glass of wine on the porch and then she suggested we go to the Handle Bar.  We walked the mile to the bar and when I walked in the bar the first thing I saw was an 8 x 10 photo of Chad hanging by the bar.  It was surreal.  I kept thinking he would walk in and order his traditional Makers and 7.  But he didn’t and Brandy and I talked about him and laughed about the time we’d had with him and I cried a little and I said good-bye.  It’s hard to lose people.  It’s hard to say good-bye.  Chad was a good man I will miss him every time I hear Ryan Adams or Willie Nelson or the Grateful Dead.  But I am so grateful for his friendship and his kindness in my life and I feel blessed to have known him and have had the opportunity to be called his friend.