I hadn't remembered that Cy Anders, who died Mar. 17, was a host on WUOT, 'til I read it on Mathew Everett's Live Like This blog. To me, Cy was this other guy, a big guy, a hippie of the first water. He hung around some of the people I met as a new Knoxvillian, in the mid-80s, when I was dating my soon-to-be husband John Hall, who has also, perplexingly, moved on to the next life (I tell that story, some of it here).
You never know what part of a person will catch your imagination. I recall Cy, and Ashley Capps (when Bonnaroo was a distant mountain to conquer), coincidentally coming for a dip in the quarry the same time John had taken me there--fellow scofflaws, fellow insiders. Cy was a bear in a pock-marked t-shirt, long hair, a mustache? Quiet, nimble, watching, a small smile for the loud girl. When he told me--us, really, I am pretty sure I just overheard from the perimeter--the high-impact tale, it was there, or maybe at a back yard food fest later that same summer, '86. "So I'm housesitting for ???," he's saying, "and I found these really good brown cows in the freezer. Big ones. Ate a couple. Ate a couple more. Ooh, then a day or two later and they were getting ready to come home and I'm remembering I better go replace the box. Cost like $6. Here I'm just eating them like popsicles and the damn things cost $1.50 each! Good stuff, though, I'm hooked... can't afford to eat 'em, though."
That was my introduction to Dove bars. Wow. Dark chocolate, creamery creamy inside... not sure how many years it was before I could afford even one on my trade journalist/young mom budget, and I never could eat two, but I always thought of Cy and his unintentional luxury as I opened the freezer, ready for decadence and delight. Never did ask him about it, though... didn't see him much for a few years, probably when he went away to study philosophy, then John and I weren't running the same circles, then he came back and started managing his daddy's baby, Ober Gatlinburg, and could probably afford all the Dove bars he wanted.
We didn't chat much, but he did me so many favors in those years. Offered to vet the comic collection that was coming down to my children from their dying father. That same year, he let my daughter Lucy hold her 12th birthday party at his parents condo in Gatlinburg, and got the whole gang "all you can play" tickets to Ober Gatlinburg. I can still see him, no torn t-shirt, but a checked shirt tucked into gray pants, hair combed neatly, coming out to reassure when Lucy's friend Ian had to be banned from the go-kart ride for wrong-way driving, laughing, soothing.
Even though my girls visited that condo time and again in the following decade, with their uncle Steve Brown, my last Rose-to-Cy conversation of any substance was that same day. He told me that since the children were guests of the park, he wasn't able to let Lucy take the bungi jump, even with my permission. What a kindness that was--my heart in my throat about this daredevil daughter, two months to the day after her father's death, only me left to decide. Cy probably didn't know the value of his caution to my poor battered psyche at the time. I myself just realized it thinking back, when I heard he'd died.
Maybe I could have learned a lot more from Cy about music, or comic books, or fiction, or philosophy--any of his areas of influence. But I'm glad I listened in when he talked about the Dove bars. Because life is short, and we should all eat ice cream when we can.
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