A Man Still Rarin’ To Go

A letter from Pete Ames Carlin, Oregonian Columnist:

I got to talk to Les a few times over the winter, and though he was obviously not feeling well at the time it was cool, and inspiring, to see how much twinkle he could bring to even the most gloomy circumstances. A dark winter afternoon; a couple of hours of chemotherapy; being described as “terminal.” He shrugged it all off and looked for the glimmer of light. And usually found it, too.

The last time we spoke was so typical. I’d been trying to reach him for a week or two, leaving messages and voicemails, hoping to track down a couple more details for the story I was writing about him. Les wasn’t always the most reliable returner-of-calls (as his outgoing message made clear), but I knew he was deeper into full-blown chemotherapy, and things had gotten, as he put it, “pretty funky.” No matter, early one evening the phone rang.

“I just wanted you to know that I DO return calls every so often,” he said, by way of hello. No introduction necessary, though. No one else has Les’s voice. He knew that. So we chatted about this and that, mostly about dinner. He was about to have his, and I was headed upstairs to fix something for my family.

“What are you gonna make?” he wanted to know. “Stir fry? Great. I’ll be there in 15 minutes, okay?”

He was kidding. He wasn’t getting out much at all by then. His energy was pretty sketchy, he admitted. He slept a lot, had a hard time getting going in the morning. A strange feeling for the city’s longest-lasting morning disc jockey. But that still left the whole afternoon and evening, didn’t it?

“Last night I was rarin’ to go,” he said. “I was up til 11 o’clock, having a ball.”

Then dinner was ready, time to say goodbye. “We’ll talk again,” he said. We didn’t, but that voice sticks with me: the sound of a man still rarin’ to go, still having a ball.