There was no reason why Pat and I should have been friends. He was well into is sixties when I met him. I was only nineteen. He had “retired” from three careers. I had only ever had part-time jobs. I fancied myself pretty special. His life story could have been a best-seller, but you’d never know it from the way he treated others. As a child, Pat lived through Hitler’s blitz on England. Coming of age just after the war, he joined the Royal Navy, eventually becoming an electronics expert in the Special Boat Service (Britain’s version of the Navy SEALs). He served his country for twenty years, and then retired for the first time, becoming an engineer for a variety of electronics and communications companies around the world. After a few years, he “retired” again, opening his own SCUBA school in the Florida Keys. This was the retirement he had always dreamed of. Yet, when tragedy struck his son’s family, up in the frigid north of Hershey, Pennsylvania, Pat and his wife sold the business and moved closer to family.
I first
met Pat when I was told I would be training a new employee on the “Rover”
shift. Things have changed significantly in the last twenty years, but in those
days one security officer patrolled the vastness of Hersheypark, often on foot,
all night. As the winter months approached, the days got shorter, and the park
closed earlier, a second foot patrol was added from five to eleven in the
evenings. This was the “Rover,” my sweet spot in the department over the dark, cold
months. So, even though I could barely pay my bills, or get my college
assignments done on time, I found myself “training” a much older man with
twenty years of special operations experience. He handled that rather well.
Pat was
tiny, maybe just over five feet. He refused to wear his uniform in any sort of
dignified, professional way. He never wore his badge on the outside of his
winter jacket (a habit I picked up). He wore a brown fur trapper-style hat on
his head, and a black and white checkered scarf, wrapped around
his neck a few times and then stuffed down the front of his jacket. When he
became too warm, he’d unzip the front of his jacket, letting the scarf spill
out like a banner. He carried an old, green thermos, the kind your grandfather
carried coffee in. Pat’s was always full of hot soup. After a cold round
through the park, he’d find a quiet place to sit down, hook his hat on some
corner, open his jacket, sip his soup, and tell tales from the old days.
I
“trained” Pat; Pat trained me. I remember one frigid evening, we were moving slowly
and quietly through the park, when Pat suddenly grabbed my arm, whispering,
“There’s a man there, in the trees.” I stopped and watched. I didn’t see
anything. “Don’t look at the trees,” Pat’s whisper was almost silent. “Look
beside them. Your eyes can’t see movement straight on in the dark.” I looked
just to the side of the clump of trees he indicated, and sure enough, after a
few seconds, I began to see small movements between two of the trunks. Someone
was hiding there. It turned out to be an employee, who thought some night-time hijinks
in the park sounded like fun, and had attempted to hide until after hours. He
hadn’t planned on meeting the super retiree, who scolded the young man is if he
were his own grand-child, and then chatted with him quietly as he walked him
off of the property. It could have been a stroll along a scenic creek in the
English country-side. By the end of the walk, the two were chums, even if one
had probably just lost his job.
Pat’s
training period ended, and he was moved to the night-shift. I would meet him at
shift change, and then not go home. I would walk in the dark with Pat for hours,
talking, listening to him tell stories over his steaming soup. As different as we
were, we also somehow just fit. I came to cherish our friendship. I suppose
though, part-time night-shift at an amusement park was never going to work out
for a man of Pat’s age and experience. The eleven-to-seven shift took its toll
on a body approaching seventy. Our boss was a former Marine. He approached
conflict with the delicacy of a sledge hammer. Pat was a scalpel. His words and
actions were deliberately planned, and so efficient you seldom realized their
impact until well after they had passed by. Pat’s skill and nuance were
recognized, but not understood. Pat moved on.
Employees
at the park rotated pretty frequently. I was used to people moving along, but I
don’t think I missed anyone quite like I missed Pat. I tried to make contact
with him outside of work. This was before Google, and he wasn’t in the phone
book. Short of subverting the lock on the supervisor’s office (thanks to Pat
for that skill) and rummaging through the former employee files, I had no means
of getting in touch with him. And, it occurred to me, maybe he wanted to be
left alone.
Almost
a decade later, I was at a restaurant, now married with two children and a
third on the way. My dinner was interrupted by a stuttered, “H-hallo, m-mate.”
There by my table was a withered, aged, Pat. He had a stroke earlier in the
year, and leaned on his wife’s arm for support. We chatted for a while, but it
was a broken, disjointed affair: me trying to wrangle kids, him trying to stay
erect. He told me the neighborhood he lived in. It was a short walk from my home.
I knew that visits to Pat’s house would do both of us some good. I didn’t go. I
had a wife and increasing number of kids. Life was too busy to spend sitting on
a porch and chatting over hot soup. So, Pat was once again relegated to the
world of once was.
Last week
I cracked open a light thriller for a quick vacation read. There, on page one,
was a member of the British Special Boat Service. I immediately grabbed my
phone and started Googling. Pat passed away just a short time after I last saw
him. That wasn’t a surprise. There was a time when I would have grieved my
failure to engage with Pat again, but at some point in life you begin to
realize that there will always be things left undone. I stand eternally grateful
for having known this odd, fascinating, magical, soup-bearing creature named Patrick
Bishop. This is my belated farewell.
