Upon hearing about the death of Dave Waite

My expectations in blogging are not harboring some delusion of affecting a change in the earth’s rotation or saving the universe. I approach this blog as a way of relating my particular passage through life. As the psalmists note poetically, time goes by quickly and all life quickly blooms and then, as quickly, fades. The blog is a way of letting the world see one’s blooms before they droop and then drop to the earth. In a less poetic and more cynical analogy, it is a bit akin to a dog marking territory, letting the rest of the animal kingdom know who has passed by.

We all have stories and those stories are important. As I recall from a theology class from the distant past, the understanding of eternal life from the theology of orthodox Judaism, is to so fully live life and achieve much in life so that the stories about your life will continue to circulate far into the future. While not the original intention behind the composing of the Psalm Offerings, in a way, posting those music compositions and noting for whom they are dedicated is a way of noting the important story of those lives who have passed into the fullness of God’s Reign, and the importance of those whose lives are still in the being of becoming.

It was with a mixture of both excitement and then sadness to hear about my friend Dave Waite from his widow, Gerda. Gerda, in great kindness, commented on the music dedicated to Dave (Psalm Offering 4, Opus 4), and informed me that Dave passed away in 2004. Dave, as I had noted in the comment about him on that blog, was larger than life, gregarious with a capital G, and living the gift God gave him fully and fearlessly. Dave, as all of us do, had his Achilles heel, but what a remarkable man he was.

I remember the very first autobiographical story that Dave related to me as we were rehearsing the opera, The Elixir of Love. We were sitting in a room on the lower level of O’Shaughnessy Music Building on the campus of the College of St. Catherine’s. The room was a very small lounge with a couple of stuffed chairs and some classroom chairs and a coca-cola vending machine, the only room, I must add, on that level that did not have a practice piano in it.

Dave talked about his mom, who had died when he was in junior high. Upon his mother’s death, his dad, a Presbyterian minister, thought it best that Dave spend some time on his Uncle’s farm, while his dad tended to those things that needed to be settled when a love one dies. It was the winter, and Dave’s uncle had a prized stud bull which had a rather sour disposition toward most homo sapiens. Dave and his cousin liked to rile the bull up by throwing frozen cow turds at the bull. One day, while his uncle was in town, they riled the bull so greatly that the bull chased them across the field. They sought to escape the bull and possibly great harm by running across a frozen pond. When the bull’s hooves hit the frozen surface he legs went in all four directions, belly flopping on the surface of the pond. Unable to get up, the bull got even angrier. Knowing that the bull was the prize stud for the farm, and fearing the wrath of his uncle, the two boys decided it would be a far better fate to be mauled by the bull then mauled by the uncle. They tried and tried to get the bull up on his feet, but to no avail. Then finally backed a tractor up to the pond, hooked an old rusty chain around the back of the tractor to the hind quarters of the bull and pulled the bull off the pond. In doing so, they damaged the bull’s most prized and valuable private parts. His uncle upon looking at the bull thought the wounds were due to getting hung up on some barb wire. The boys never told the uncle exactly what happened. All Dave related that was in the Spring, when his uncle sent the bull out to mate with cows who were in heat, the bull could not perform his primary function. Dave said the memory that lingered in his mind was the sight of the unperforming bull being chased across the pasture by very single-minded cows in heat. Alas, the bull ended up being hamburger on somebody’s plate.

The second story that Dave related to me had a similar agricultural bent to it. Dave for a semester or two studied voice at the Toronto Conservatory of Music. His voice professor, whose name I cannot remember, sang in the Metropolitan Opera. His voice professor also ran a dairy farm when he was not engaged singing for the Met. Dave was at his voice professor’s farm for voice lessons when two men from the Met came to negotiate a contract for the professor to sing with the opera for another season. Upon arriving at the farm, the professor’s wife directed them to the barn where the professor was engaged in milking cows. These two business men, in expensive $700 suits (remember this was back in 1970 or so) went down to the barn where they found the professor in his overalls busily milking his cows. As they talked, the professor told them not to stand behind this one particular cow, because the cow had the scours (a rather explosive diarrhea condition). The two men ignored the warning of the professor. When the cow started to fidget as the professor was milking her, he slapped her on the rear end to which the cow responded by literally showering the two men in their expensive business suits in liquid cow manure. The shower was so profuse that Dave said you could see where they had stood by the outline on the wall behind them. Dave said, covered in cow crap, they ran up to the house clean up but the professor’s wife stopped them at the door, made them undress on the porch, put their clothes in a plastic bag, and gave them coveralls to wear back into the city. Apparently, this did not have a negative affect on his professor’s singing for the Met that season.

Dave was a very gifted storyteller, and we heard many a great story from Dave during the production of that opera. I had the joy of hearing many more for some years afterward. I do miss him and wish him the blessings of the greatest story that can be related, the fullness of his life with God today.