In memory of Roger Potter

  Today I’m departing somewhat from the theme of the blog to send my thoughts to Roger Potter, a close friend of my family’s, who passed away Monday after suffering a series of health complications. Roger was quite possibly the kindest human being I’ve ever known in my life, and one who, in my estimation, died a couple of centuries before his time.
    I consider this post only “somewhat” of a thematic departure, in that Roger was also an amazing feminist, though I doubt it was a label he applied to himself. That’s partly because labels and Roger were mutually exclusive, but also because he did not, to my knowledge, ever consciously commit himself to the actual goal of gender equality, and yet if the cause of much of society’s gendered conflict is, as I believe to be the case, the massive populations of men who flounder amidst competing pronouncements of what it means to be male, then Roger was an astoundingly positive influence, simply by virtue of being who he was: a damn good guy.
    I knew him, in part, in his capacity as my first employer, when, right out of high school, I signed on to work as a longshoremen for Alaska’s Southeast Stevedoring. Roger was our dispatcher. Between the hours of five and six a.m., he and I and four other guys would gather at the local dock and wait for the massive cruise ships to roll in, at which point we’d wrangle their back-breaking mooring lines out of the water and around the seagull-stained anchoring posts.
    In both the froth of the job and its breeze-shooting prelude, Roger was a joy to be around. He was a great storyteller, a good listener, and a model boss. Moreover, while the longshoring crew was a great group of guys, such that the following was never an issue, I know without a doubt that he would have expertly extinguished any of that destructive competitiveness that all too often explodes when testosterone and manual labor collide.
    But there’s more that I’m trying to get at with this line of thought, and while the last thing I’d want to do is turn this attempt at an obituary into an obnoxious author’s character study, it was too moving a part of his personality for me to leave out: Roger embodied, in perfect harmony, many of the classic traits of both masculinity and femininity.
    He was a beast at the docks, an absolute powerhouse. Dad, who also had the honor of longshoring with Roger, for a longer time than I did, used to say that when you saw Roger working from a distance, you couldn’t tell if he was hauling in a line or making his bed. Dad meant two things by this: first that Roger made a grueling task look effortless, and second that he performed something outwardly brutal with grace and delicacy.
    Everything Roger did had grace in it. Everything about him was in some way gentle. His lifestyle spanned a profession that one associates with no less hypermasculine a figure than Marlon Brando with a love of hummingbirds and quilting.  At a time when the media had, in spite of the best efforts of my parents, left my impressionable teenage psyche feeling as if feminist traits would flat-out emasculate me, Roger was the perfect role model, showing me that such traits not only coexisted nicely with masculinity, but made you – in short – a better guy all around.
    Roger’s funeral will take place tomorrow. I won’t be able to make the trip home, so I’ll have to attend in spirit. My thoughts go out to you, Roger, and to the longshoring team, who will, as I understand it, arrive at your service wearing their hardhats.
    We know for a fact you’d have wanted it this way.