Eulogy for Pete Soloway

We once caught Pete pouring juice into his cereal. “What's the difference,” he said, “I was going to have OJ with my breakfast anyway!” Pete had an endless appetite. His quest for the best pizza in Central Jersey was only matched by his habit of trying to get you to share a really bad beer with him. He loved my Mom's fruit salad but to the end scandalized her by eating it with mayonnaise.

Today we have an opportunity to remember Pete together and to be sad that he is gone. We will tell stories about him and make each other laugh in remembrance and appreciation. These things are appropriate at services around the world but here, at Pete's service, I think we can do more.

At Pete's service it would be equally appropriate to fiddle around with a new instrument, haggle for a used car, learn how to fix something, or bicker about some obscure scientific fact with an old friend.

Pete did not have a blindly conventional or a dogmatically unconventional bone in his body. For as long as I can remember, Pete used empty jam jars as water glasses. His television sat on a soap box. When not in use, he masked the TV by hanging a print over it on hooks that he added to the back of the stretcher. His basement was a cornucopia of musical instruments, electronics, wood-working tools, assorted floor-lamps, and old phones. There was even an organized and labeled cabinet full of fuses. Pete would collect anything that he could use. Apparently when I was little, Pete came into my house and said to my father, “Follow me in your van, Rich. We're picking up a pipe organ.”

Pete loved finding ways to make things work better. He always had something he was working on - usually not for him. Pete was not only my family's best friend but our only handyman as well. Pete ran our cable wire, fixed our computers, unclogged our sinks, and rescued us from an endless number of basement floods and sticky automotive situations.

One day about 15 years ago my Dad's car broke down on our way to a contra-dance near the Hudson river. Anna, Jesse, and I were with him. Pete drove up from Princeton to see if he could fix it. A belt of some kind had snapped. Luckily there were a few other belts in the car that were roughly the same shape and size so Pete started swapping them out, taking belts with less important functions and switching them to more important positions. Unfortunately by the time he finished we were still missing an essential belt. We were stuck.

It was at this moment that 13 year old Anna piped up. “Daddy, I saw this thing on television where they used pantyhose to fix a car.” We all laughed - all of us except Pete, of course. He just got the slightly far-away look on his face that meant he was calculating something. A few minutes later, armed with a pair of pantyhose that Anna had bought straight off the legs of some generous contra-dancer we were chugging out of the parking lot with Pete following behind. We made it home and that pantyhose hung on my Dad's fridge for years after.

Since I moved out of Princeton I've had to rely on Anna to be my handyman -- but there have been times when even she has needed to call for back-up. I will never forget rolling around on the floor in silent and juvenile laughter as Anna dialed her dad on speaker phone and opened the conversation by saying, “Dad what do you know about ball-cocks?” Unperturbed, Pete said “Fixing a toilet Poo?”

Another time I was installing a new light fixture in my bathroom. I called Pete and asked him a question about the fourth or fifth step in the process. Instead of answering, Pete wanted to make sure that I had turned the power off to the room before I started. “Of course” I said, holding my half-charred pliers behind my back.

Although it was second nature to him, I found Pete's desire to make things work better particularly heroic in the last few years. More and more we saw him working patiently on his own body. He modified his hearing aids with a pair of wire-cutters. He screwed a hook into the wall above his seat on the couch so he could hang IV bags. On his birthday this year, he was not feeling so good. Anna drove off and returned with a couple of oxygen tanks… set up to be used by alpacas. Pete hooked himself up having devised a system that involved some tubing, a rubber band, and an earplug.

One of the joys of knowing someone like Pete is that it frees you to run even your craziest ideas by that person, knowing that they won't scoff. In fact, I think it frees you to even have those ideas.

During the summer after my sophomore year in college Pete hired me to help him clean out and pack up his parents house in Morristown. His father had died a few years before and his mother was moving full-time to North Carolina. It was a hot summer day and we were working in the attic of the garage. Pete's dad was a cabinet-maker and the attic was stacked full with worthless cabinet samples from his shop. Although we had set out pretty early (stopping at McDonalds for breakfast as we often did) by the time mid-morning hit we could tell that between the stifling heat and the single pull-down ladder this was going to be a long, sweaty, tiring job. 95% joking, I said “We should just throw all this stuff out the window.” You can probably guess what happened.

If these stories have a common thread, I believe it is pragmatism, thoughtfulness, and open mindedness. These qualities made Pete such a joy to be around. I hope that now that he is gone, all of us can pick up his mantle and carry these characteristics with us every day for the rest of our lives. Let's start today.