Logistics: An Elegy for My Father-in-Law The term refers to the management of details, particularly the use of space and time. In any society, things are produced, sold or traded, then held or used until they’re sold or traded again, and the process repeats over time until at last the thing in question has served its purpose, worn out, or otherwise lost its value. At that point it is recycled or discarded. Sometimes a particular thing is merely lost, disappearing before its time, while it is still of value to those who want or need it. The life of anything that moves through space and time is finite. And so are people. Today I find myself wondering about the logistics of human relationships, because on October 28, 2013, Jamie Hitsman’s time ran out. Today he occupies a much smaller space on this planet, but not in the minds of those of us who knew him. Jamie’s widow, Karla Hitsman, and I share the same birthday: October 20th. I am seven years older than Karla, having been born in 1949. In 2000 I married Karla’s daughter, Sheyene. Sheyene was born in 1978, 29 years after me. When Karla and Jamie married in 2001, I became Jamie’s son-in-law, despite the fact that Jamie was 20 years younger than I, and 13 years younger than Karla. Whenever the four of us went out to lunch or dinner, the logistics challenged the wait staff: “Yes, that’s her daughter . . . No, she’s my wife, not my daughter . . . No, he’s not my son, he’s my father-in-law . . . No, she’s not my sister, she’s my mother-in-law . . . No, that one’s not my wife and my daughter—this is Topeka, not the movie Chinatown.” Like the rest of us, Jamie bore such confusions with grace and good humor. This was his general approach to life, and it served him well. There were many times that he needed all the humor or grace he could muster. Anyone reading this surely knows that in his youth, Jamie was an accomplished athlete. After high school, he earned a football scholarship to Long Beach State, a full ride. His life seemed set. Then, during a preseason practice in full pads, he blew out his knee. Incredibly, the head coach who had awarded him the scholarship rescinded it. This was the first of a series of bad luck setbacks Jamie suffered throughout his life. Some setbacks were of his own making: a joke that went too far, a curve taken too fast. Through them all—all but the last one, the motorcycle accident five years ago, which robbed him of mobility as well as speech—through all the others, he persevered with a feisty spirit that reminded me, despite the difference in our ages, of another important person in my life: my father. Like my father, my father-in-law loved to work with his hands. Whenever something broke, Jamie’s first instinct was to repair rather than replace. Like my father, Jamie’s favorite things to work on were cars. Jamie knew automobiles—engines, interiors, suspensions, brakes, tires—even better than my father, who once built a Model T from scrap all by himself. Jamie not only knew cars, he knew how to talk about them in interesting ways. His talk was technical: headers, lifters, gaskets, torque. To my discredit, I had only pretended to listen to my father’s many speeches about such things when I was a teenager. To my good fortune, I got to hear them again when I was in my fifties—from Jamie. The space in my life that had opened up in 1995 when my father died was filled in the first decade of the new millennium by Jamie. Jamie’s second favorite thing after automobiles was telling stories. Like my father, Jamie was a natural storyteller. He had characteristic phrases. “That guy’s a little light in the loafers, if you know what I mean,” he’d say, referring to someone who talked a big game but lacked the skill or commitment to back it up. I always knew what Jamie meant, not only because the logistics of storytelling interest me but because Jamie’s stories were always interesting. Though we were of different generations, Jamie’s stories were about the world I’d grown up in, the people I’d grown up with: hardscrabble working class people who make their way by the sweat of their brow and the keenness of their wits. To Jamie and everyone who knew him, I have one more thing to say: Thank you for allowing me into your life. Jamie, you used to brag that your son-in-law (sometimes you slipped and called me your “father-in-law”) was “a professor and a writer of books, but he never acts like it. He’s always a regular guy.” You always gave me credit for accepting you as the man you were—but you are the one who deserves credit: for accepting me. And for being kind to those who needed it, for being a loving husband to Karla and a loving father to Jackson, for being gentle when you could have been harsh, for sharing your stories and your life, and for being a friend and father figure to an older man who outlived you. jamie.hitsman.muchloved
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:50:19 +0000
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