Time Comes For Us All

But it just came for our fellow Slack Tider, Ray Balestri, 1960-2025

The Old Town Astronomical Clock, Prague, Czech Republic

Not that you asked, but for the most part, my last week sailed along uneventfully and even satisfactorily, as weeks often do. At least until there’s An Event, the kind that reminds you that life itself is forever prone to rude interruption. The shad run is in full bloom, and I hit it both solo (how I prefer to fish — I move faster alone), along with one of my sons (my only other regular fishing companion), putting up solid double-digit numbers each time. For an avid fly fisherman like myself, these are my High Holy Days each year, when I ignore the call of family, friends, and sometimes, even the work that keeps the roof over my head, to chase those running, vaulting, quicksilver bullets around our rivers until my arms get sore, the sun quits on us, and/or the Hickory and American shad head back out to sea, which they sadly always do.

Likewise, I made some progress in my aforementioned war of attrition with the house sparrows. They’ve been trying to crowd my beloved bluebirds out of their box, before the latter can get down to business time, which would make me the proud bank-shot papa of Brood #17 since I first became a bluebird nerd seven years ago. My sparrow trap arrived from the Pride of Waite Park, Minnesota, Uncle Blaine (not my uncle — that’s his name). And though it took nearly a week of me toying with setup and location, I have finally caught five of the little brown bastards. Uncle Blaine basically regards sparrows — an invasive species who often murder bluebirds and their young — as rats with wings. And his trap instructions provide explicit ways to snuff the troublemakers. (I’ll spare you the details.) But I’m a catch-and-releaser when I fish, and I see no reason to violate that principle for birds that I live-trap. I didn’t get into bluebird husbandry so I could croak sparrows. So I drop the little hooligans off, unharmed, at a pond several miles from my house, wishing them a happy and short life, telling them to stay the hell out of my yard before I change my mind and go Uncle Blaine on them.

Despite all this nature and nurture, I do realize that the nation damn near fell apart last week with the worldwide tariff war declared on all our friends — one which next-to-nobody desires, and which will hike the price of everything from cars to clothes to groceries. (I seriously doubt that everyone’s favorite faux-populist, Donald Trump, has ever even bought groceries, though he’s clearly eaten plenty of them.) I bit off a little chunk of that, too:

But while this site has been uncomfortably (for me) politics-heavy during the homestretch of last year’s election and especially since Inauguration Day — the daily buggering of the republic has had a way of catching my attention and not letting go of it — my heart wasn’t really in it this week, even as my IRA was circling the drain, spurring an amended retirement strategy (working until the Reaper demands my time card).

For in the midst of all this, I received a hard kick in the shorts. The worst kind of news. One of my favorite readers and email correspondents, and someone who even occasionally made it into my pieces as a subject — a man many of you comments-section regulars likely brushed up against, as he jabbed and joked and offered words of edification and argument and support to many of you — is no longer with us. Not because he quit Slack Tide. Ray Balestri was a $250 founding member, and I can testify from our conversations about the glories of strong drink that Ray was no quitter. Only 64-years-old, this life quit him while neither of us were looking or expecting it. And he’s someone that it deeply hurts to lose.

I found out Ray left us the hard way — by surprise. Since he showed up as a paid subscriber in early 2022, just months after I launched this site, he wrote me regularly in the comments section, where he was a fixture, and then on the side. At first I humored him, as I do most strangers who come at me in good faith, and even some who don’t. Then I became intrigued by him, eventually coming to count on his missives. His emails were smart, generous, acerbic, literate, funny, and always well-crafted. He was what I call a “whole-ball-of-wax guy”— getting after all of life, with its absurdities and complexities. Ray was irreverent about the annoying stuff (politics, hypocrites, aging) and reverent about the important stuff (dogs, boats, family — he adored his wife and two sons, which came through every time he talked about any of them, which he often did). A successful Dallas lawyer and investor who dabbled in publishing himself and who counted literati like Ben Fountain as friends (Ray wrote articles now and then for D Magazine, and even cranked out a novel that I haven’t read), he regularly landed in my inbox on every subject from art to ass cancer. Having beaten Stage 3 colon cancer in his late thirties, Ray was a zealot about getting colonoscopies, practically forcing me to do so at gunpoint last year. (I did indeed get tested and passed with flying colors, even though I barely studied.)

My last email contact with Ray came on the day after this past Christmas. We were talking audiobooks. (“Lee Horsley reading Lonesome Dove is fantastic. And for escapist pleasure, Hugh Fraser reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is pure joy,” he wrote.) After a month or so went by in the new year, and Ray had neither shown up in my comments section or my inbox — very unlike him — I sent out a wellness-check email. Which was met by silence.

Did I write something that offended him? I asked myself this, because in my line of work — the opinion-slinging business — that happens all the time. People you thought were on your side read what you really think, then all of the sudden, ghost you. In fact, I’d worried about this happening with Ray, before. We had very similar tastes in most things, and agreed politically on almost everything — he, too, was a lifelong Republican who grew revolted by his old party abandoning everything they used to pretend to stand for (from personal responsibility to basic reality-acknowledgment) and punched out during the MAGAfication of it all.

But since Ray was a talented lawyer who quarreled with people for a living, we enjoyed arguing about everything from music (he was for Steely Dan, I’m against Steely Dan — I once told him “’Rikki Don’t Lose that Number’ makes me want to drown a kitten, and then myself”) to the existence of God. I’m for God, he was against God. Even if he grew up religious and knew the Bible better than most Baptist preachers. In fact, Ray once told me that in high school, he was in a Christian rock band that played Jesus Christ Superstar covers, meaning it was a small miracle he’d merely become an atheist, and not a Satanist. But he was still my favorite kind of atheist, the kind who deeply enjoyed sparring, but who wasn’t so arrogant that he couldn’t write: “I'm prepared to accept the possibility that the God I do not believe in might be stronger than my disbelief. I would add a corollary to that: Any God worth his salt would be incomprehensible to me.”

Ray Balestri

Here we are, in fact, jousting in a piece I published in 2022, titled “What The Hell Is God’s Problem: A Reader Puts God, The Book of Job, and Ask Matt In The Dock.” The “reader” in question was named “Chuck E. In Love.” An alias Ray chose, after the old Ricki Lee Jones song, but which was inspired by the fact that a few months earlier, after a piece I’d written on Christian furries, in which I mentioned my sister once having to don a sweaty, dank Chuck E. Cheese rat costume for a bad part-time job, Ray informed me that in the early nineties, he’d actually starred in a Chuck E. Cheese fitness video, playing “The Trainer” trying to whip Chuck E’s friend, Mr. Munch, into shape. Ray’s stellar acting can be seen from the 46:39 to 49:10 mark, and might be the best evidence why he became a lawyer, instead of a thespian.

But as the silence grew longer, I became worried. Just this past week, I forwarded a Sam Harris piece on losing friends over politics to Ray. Last year, Ray had actually bought me a gift subscription to the famous atheist’s Substack, perhaps wishing to convert me to godlessness. Perhaps having no wish to do so, but just wishing to keep the conversation going. Which I respected. A lot of atheists of my acquaintance — and I have been friends with some of the best of them, like Christopher Hitchens — seem to grapple with God more curiously and honestly than many of my fellow Christians do. Even as a believer, I sometimes have doubts in the unseen, too, and am grateful to them for making me reckon with uncertainty. We should all have to wrestle with what we profess.

When I didn’t hear from Ray yet again, I decided to Google him up, just to make sure he hadn’t been busted for fraud or deported to an El Salvadoran prison, as sometimes happens these days. Instead, I immediately turned up this obituary in the Dallas Morning News. It said he died of “natural causes” on January 4. The wind was knocked out of me. He hadn’t even been sick. Unable to accept that, I found his wife Heather’s email, and asked her what happened. I had never talked to her before. I had never talked to any of Ray’s friends or family before. I had never even heard Ray’s voice, or met him in person, even if we’d made loose plans to meet up and drink, as you often do with people you like, but have no hard intentions of actually seeing. Which didn’t matter, because our shared love of the written word had made us boon companions, helping us get under the skin of things more deeply than even in-person drinking can do. An act which Ray had respect for. As he once wrote to someone in my comments section: “Nothing brings divergent ideas into an easy camaraderie like a couple of bar stools pushed up to a worn wood bar and tumblers of whiskey in front of you with a healthy pour. I could likely even pass an enjoyable evening with a Trump voter.”

Ray’s wife, Heather, was exactly as he’d described her. Kind and gracious. She thanked me for sharing stories about Ray, apologized that I hadn’t been notified — though Ray, not surprisingly, had a very wide circle of friends, many of whom she didn’t know — and told me that he’d passed suddenly of dilated cardiomyopathy. Which Google tells me “is a condition where the heart's main pumping chamber (left ventricle) becomes enlarged and weakened, making it difficult for the heart to pump blood effectively.” Apparently, he went fast.

Way too fast for me.

In the lead-up to this piece, I spent days reading over Ray’s old emails and comments-section entries. I cut and pasted 60 solid printed-pages-worth of them. A lot of it was written in confidence, and even though Ray was a fine prose performer, far be it from me to assume what he’d want to see the light of day. But I will break that confidence to share something I think he wouldn’t mind getting out there even a little. Something that speaks to what we all face at one point or another: life’s fragility.

We talked about death a lot in the weeks leading up to his, which, as a fit 64-year-old who looked like he was in his early forties, he didn’t see coming. A good friend of Ray’s in his fifties had fallen ill with pancreatic cancer — and his friend circle, including Ray, was taking turns feeding him. The handwriting was on the wall. Around Thanksgiving, Ray had informed me that his buddy had four boys — ages 7 to 13 — who would be fatherless by that time next year. It didn’t take nearly that long.

On December 18 — eight days before the last time I’d ever speak with Ray, and 17 days before his own unexpected death — I received an email from Ray, with the subject line: “My friend died.” He wrote this:

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night with the thought, “Rick died.” This morning his wife texted all of us on the text chain that he had died this morning surrounded by his family. Very weird to think that we all get to go about our day — feeding the dogs, drinking coffee, seeing the sun come out from behind the clouds, getting a text from your child, typing e-mails — and he doesn’t get to do any of these things ever again.

Coincidentally, I got a CT scan this morning, and lying on the cold table, an IV drip in my arm, thinking about Rick, it really became real that I will die, too, we all will die, and even if we die surrounded by family and friends, we face death alone. Back at home, my wife noted that Rick died on a beautiful day, December 18th. And we wondered what days we would die on. Reminded me of that W.S. Merwin poem:

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

I couldn’t have said it better. And now I don’t have to. For I have Ray’s (and Merwin’s) words to hang on to. Which I will when I miss him. Which I already do.

Bonus Track: One of Ray’s passions — he had many — was boats. He loved being on the water in any craft, for any reason. Two Thanksgivings ago, he wrote this to me:

I hope you and your family and animals had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Your Thanksgiving day meditation on being thankful was clearly enjoyed by your Slack Tide subscribers.

I was thinking of another non-Trump topic that would likely resonate with your readership, which, from the evidence of their grammatically correct comments, skews older, and it was prompted by your description of your time on the rack on the hot Amalfi Coast with your Italian in-laws, and how it would be the last time your father-in-law would ever visit Italy.

I don’t recall if you thought he was aware of it…… but it reminded me of the time when my late parents visited me in Dallas and we took my boat out for a sail on a lake in east Texas. My mother had been a sailor all her life, came from a line of sailors, and loved being on the water (a trait that got passed down to me). She was in her early 80s then and already failing, and I knew it was going to be the last time in her life she would ever set foot on a boat again, feel the lake breeze on her face, or shout “coming about” as she shoved the tiller to starboard warning us to duck our heads as the boom swung around.

I didn’t say anything (because I didn’t want to ruin the mood), and she didn’t say anything (although I had no idea what she was thinking). It was a beautiful day and I couldn’t have asked for a better last sail.

I think about it a lot. I knew there was going to be a last time I fed my boys a bottle, tied their shoes for them, carried them on my shoulders, read books to them while they sat on my lap. Because I was a considerably older father and was more aware of the finiteness of all things, I greedily indulged each time when I could feel that the end of each phase was coming near.

And then each one stopped, and I didn’t realize that the last time had been the last time.

Here, I should probably do the decent thing, give in, and play some Steely Dan for Ray. But a man has to stick by his convictions, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll fulfill a promise I made to Ray last June, after he wrote this:

A favorite saying of my mother’s was, “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” (Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows). We considered having that on her headstone instead of whatever forgettable thing is on there now. (The engraving on my grandfather’s headstone, my mother’s father, is “Home is the sailor, home from the sea.” Which I just Googled to discover is from the poem “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson).)

I hold boats in the same esteem as dogs (i.e., the highest). Every boat, small, large, motored, sailed, oared, paddled, is well-pleasing in my sight. I love my ski boat for skiing (and tooling around the lake, and for a direct jaunt across the lake to go to our friends’ house for happy hour). But I love our little sailboat just as much (coming from a family of sailors) and our kayaks that my wife and I take out early morning before the heat descends. When I was deeply involved in our church youth group, we would go for week-long canoe trips in the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota (with all the pristine nooks and crannies you mention, and the occasional moose with its giant rack crashing through the woods to splash into the lake up to its belly, scarring the bejesus out of us). Taking a leisurely five-mile paddle on a standup paddle board down the Swan River in Montana is Heaven (assuming you’re going with the current). I’m just as happy sailing with my friend in his 40-foot sailboat as I am when we anchor in Nantucket Harbor and take the zodiac with the 5-hp outboard into town for dinner. Spending the night on the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier off the cost of San Diego was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

If it floats, it’s for me. I never turn away an opportunity to get on a boat, any boat.

I responded to Ray with this: “A good motto, and would make a good headstone. If you go before I do, will tell your people that was your last will and testament.” And then I played him this song by another irreverent Texan with proper reverence for all the right things, one who sang of the glories of heading out to sea: