An old Peace Corps friend, Dave, died suddenly this weekend. A bunch of returned volunteers were weaving in and out of a Facebook thread commenting on one person’s announcement that he was coming to the States in a few days to interview for a job with the Peace Corps, when someone broke in with the news that Dave had succumbed to a brain aneurysm the previous day.

I hoped it was a joke, some kind of inside joke between the two of them that I just wouldn’t get. Dave couldn’t die at 40. Dave had saved two lives in one Thanksgiving!

Fucking Facebook. This is what it’s come to. The medium that everyone else uses to post what they had for lunch and how much they are T’ing G that it’s F is now how everyone will know that you’re dead. When all of us first met, the internet barely existed, and no one had a telephone. If you wanted to deliver a message you had to send it through the Tunisian post, or get up off your ass and go tell them in person, unannounced.

That’s how I first met Dave. Another volunteer brought him and another trainee to my house during a “kick-out,” a week-long period during training. It was meant to be the trainees’ first real experience out and about in the country. I suppose A., the other volunteer, thought his charges should see the bright lights of Tunis, so they ended up at my place.

Dave was young, cocky, and good-looking. I thought that pretty much summed him up, with no need to give him any further consideration, but that weekend he surprised me. He was smart and well-read and really, really charming. The kind of attention that you or I might lavish on a seduction target or someone who might leave us a million dollars was the kind of focus that Dave turned on everyone: pretty girls, ugly girls, middle-aged women, old men, straight men, gay men. At one point during that first weekend he paid me the best compliment I’ve ever received:

“You know, you have a really good vocabulary,” he said.

And that’s how you make a friend for life. He had me at “vocabulary.”

Here’s a photo from that weekend. Doesn’t this make the Peace Corps look like fun?

NabeulBe

Dave was the Brobdingnag among Liliputs.

Dave gave me gifts of music, literature, laughter. He turned me on to Joni Mitchell; I had only known “Big Yellow Taxi” but he loaned me cassettes of Blue and Court and Spark, and I was converted. When I taught Wuthering Heights and complained about how dull it was, he borrowed one of my photocopies (university policy; we couldn’t afford or perhaps get our hands on actual books) and schooled me in its genius. Every few months, he tried to get me to read Love in the Time of Cholera, but I never could get past the first few pages. He told me that life was too short to read trash, a view against which I used to protest, but which I’ve now come to espouse. Life is too damn short.

He was nicknamed Haj because of a red fez he wore at some party or another. Hajji is an honorific given to men who wear the fez, denoting that they’ve made the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. It’s inconceivable that Dave’s made his last hajj.

Peace, xuyya.