LAKE LEELANAU, MI – I was 15, broke and on the hunt for my first car when Michigan author Jim Harrison said he'd sell me his daughter's 1982 Mazda GLC hatchback.
As Jim, my father and I left the Bluebird Restaurant in Leland to return home - we were neighbors, or what passes for it up north, and Jim and my dad spent a lot of time together bird hunting, eating, wine drinking and talking about what was wrong with the world - when Jim set the price: $333.33.
It was the summer of 1991. I was working a minimum wage job at a fast-food/frozen yogurt store in the resort town we called home and the deal for that two-door, silver gem, with a tad bit of rust, a whole lot of miles and an unending sense of soon-to-be freedom, seemed too good to be true.
It wasn't.
Jim meant the bargain-basement figure, and he allowed me to work some of it off by stacking wood on the porch of his writing studio behind his family's house. It wasn't the first time I had walked to Jim's house to carry split logs dumped nearby up three or four stairs and turn them into the pile he'd burn all winter to stay warm while writing.
Now that I look back, that may have been the last fall I performed the task.
Harrison's death at his home in Arizona on Saturday, March 26, at the age of 78 brought memories of growing up around the man many revere for his poetry, novellas and what brought him into far more people's world, movie screenplays like "Legends of the Fall."
But to me, he was none of that. He was just Jim, a family friend.
I grew up around him and his late wife, Linda, and their daughters, Jamie and Anna. I ate at their homes, first playing outside or watching TV while the adults talked and prepared dinner. Later, I sat alongside them, though mostly as a fly on the wall listening and sharing a drink. I was introduced to NPR during drives around the countryside, usually covered in dog hair and squeezed between newspapers, hunting rifles and shotguns.
The profiles and memorials being written or re-read today, the ones that present him with superlatives about his craft and impact on American writing, I suppose they're accurate. I've never looked at him like that and thus I've not compiled a laundry list of "this one time Jim..." tales.
Nor have I examined his works. Though I've read a handful, I can't recite one passage he's written. Frankly, I wouldn't be qualified to weigh in anyhow.
The stories of his raw, say what's on his mind persona, that's not character building as narratives and death sometimes do. My wife, upon meeting Jim for the first time while we were dating – after she had read "Julip" as part of a class at Grand Valley State University where Jim's papers now reside – was blown away by his coarse language and demeanor.
I guess it hadn't occurred to me to prepare her, not that she'd mind, for what I'd seen and heard for so long. We laughed about that Sunday.
When Jim and Linda later came to our wedding, a friend swiped Jim's dinner placecard, a reminder he shared with me on Facebook upon learning of Jim's death, and a move that then and now reminds me of his fame.
I have no romantic story that Jim inspired me to be a writer or mentored me along the way – clearly by way of the quality of these words.
Rather, I think he probably laughed when I chose and pursued a career in journalism. Even so, he'd ask about the state of the industry and my place in it when we'd cross paths in Leelanau and eventually Arizona.
As for that car, I drove it to my first concert at Pine Knob, took it across the Mackinac Bridge and bombed all around Michigan, the state we call home.
Jim made that possible with his charity.
That's what I'll recall.
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