‘Telling us goodbye’

Andre “Andy” Pedersen smiles at me as the opening notes of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” boom from my car’s speakers. We are driving from Moscow, Idaho, to Seattle, two almost-forgotten friends sharing music and memories on the return leg of a journey back in time to our alma mater, the University of Idaho, and the 30th reunion of our fraternity pledge class.

As Andy starts to speak, I turn down the music.

“Tell me about Saturday night,” Andy says, a hint of worry and his native Danish in his voice. “I’m having trouble remembering.”

For Andy, fragments of the weekend already are disappearing Sunday as we drive. He has Alzheimer’s, and the disease already is robbing him of his short-term memory.

Andy had called me a few months before from his home in Wichita, Kan. Would I reunite in April with other Phi Gamma Delta brothers – Fijis, we call ourselves – who had pledged in the fall of 1972?

Eighteen of 27 answered his call. We came from every corner of the country, because Brother Andy needed us.

We found out we needed him just as much.

One weekend brought an almost spiritual sharing of feelings between middle-aged men who thought they had lost each other. One weekend awakened pleasant memories for me, along with a few painful ones. One weekend made me question what I had done with three decades.

As I drive, I start to tell Andy what happened the night before in the Gold Room.

Strong medicine

Andy stood up and slowly made his way with the help of a cane to the front of a hotel banquet room of Fijis in their early 50s. He had been rehearsing this moment for weeks so he wouldn’t forget what he wanted to say.

The 54-year-old man who stood before us wore thick glasses, and his blond hair and beard were turning silver. Yet his eyes and voice were just as I remembered.

Andy told us the reunion was the therapy he needed to hold back his Alzheimer’s for a little while. He told us what a success we all had been and how proud he was of us. But most of all he spoke of the bonds of friendship and fraternity.

“It’s something you carry with you for the rest of your life,” Andy said, his voice strong as he leaned on his cane carved from Texas mesquite. “Every one of us cares about each other. That’s something that doesn’t happen in the rest of the world on a regular basis.”

Someone leaned forward at a nearby table and whispered what most of us were thinking: “Andy’s telling us goodbye.”

Jerry “Wildcat” Myers stood up and joined Andy. A manager of a wilderness ranch in Idaho, he pulled out eagle feathers he’d found along the Middle Fork of the Salmon River and stuck one in the band of the cowboy hat that Andy had kept since college.

“This is strong medicine,” Wildcat said. “May this give you strength. We know you’re going to need it.”

Tears rolled down Andy’s cheeks, and the two men embraced. The rest of us encircled them and joined in the hug.

Beer bellies and bifocals

Fijis began streaming in Friday night, taking over a Moscow pub, and I saw that time had changed us all. Some had white hair, and a few had hardly any hair at all. Beer bellies and bifocals had replaced bell-bottoms.

But as I heard their voices and looked into their eyes, these aging men turned into the kids I lived and laughed with 30 years before. A handshake and a hug peeled back the decades. In minutes, it was like we were back on campus after summer break.

Old photos and pitchers of beer were passed around, and memories poured out. Scrubbing toilets and mopping floors on Saturday details. Winter wake-up calls in an icebox of an attic where we bunked. Skipping a Friday class to grab a burger or a game of foosball.

As we talked, we opened up to each other. The banker and the farmer. The real-estate developer and the teacher. The architect and the guy on disability. Fat bank accounts and fancy cars didn’t matter. We listened in a way we couldn’t have 30, 20 or 10 years ago.

I couldn’t take my eyes off one old photo. Seven young men were clustered around a pickup after a hunting trip, shotguns in hand. On the right stood a tall, slim kid with blond hair and a proud smile. His eyes took me back 30 years.

It was a picture of Andy with his whole life in front of him.

Old coach’s pep talk

Saturday afternoon, a few of us gathered at the Corner Club. Moscow’s timeless bar had been renovated, but the tubs of beer were still cheap and tasty.

Someone noticed football coach Dennis Erickson at a nearby table dissecting the Vandals’ final scrimmage played that day. I walked over in my Idaho sweatshirt and introduced myself.

“I’m a sports editor,” I said, “but I’m here as a Vandal alum.”

I pointed to our table and mentioned the reunion and Andy.

Erickson is in his second tour of duty as Idaho’s head coach and was a young assistant when we were in college. His shock of white hair showed that, just like us, he’d been away from his old school for a long time.

Soon Erickson joined us at our table, shaking our hands and wishing us well.

A few hours later at our hotel, just before Andy’s moving speech, the old coach made a surprise appearance in the Gold Room.

“I just wanted to tell you how great what you’re doing is,” Erickson said. “I hope other groups do this in 30 years.”

Reelin’ in the years

Sunday morning, the brothers started leaving town. Andy and I needed to drive back to Seattle, where we would rejoin our wives.

With Deep Purple, The Who and Steely Dan CDs as our soundtrack, we took a trip back three decades and talked about who we had been, who we had become and where we were heading.

My father died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s 14 years ago, and spending time with Andy brought back emotions I thought had been buried with Dad. Getting the disease myself had become a fear I admitted to no one. It was stashed alongside the guilt, horror and helplessness of watching someone you love fade away.

Yet as I drove back home with a man grateful for each new day, a man facing a bleak future with courage and dignity, I found myself talking about the unthinkable.

For Andy, Alzheimer’s was just another hurdle in a life littered with them. Two months after most of us graduated, a motorcycle he was riding hit a truck head on, fracturing his skull, collapsing both lungs and nearly shearing off one leg. The accident left him in a coma, and his family and Fiji brothers gathered at the hospital to say goodbye.

“I thought there was no way I was going to see him again,” recalled John Robinson, now a Boise banker and one of the Fijis who visited Andy’s bedside that summer of ‘76. “He has a very, very strong will to live. All of us could take a lesson from him.”

Andy awakened from his coma after 31 days and had to relearn virtually everything. He never walked again without a cane, but he always kept going forward. He returned to college and later passed four medical boards. After a divorce, he moved to Kansas and was working as a counselor when he met and married Yolanda.

Four years ago, at age 50, Andy was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a disease that may be linked to his horrific head injury. He says a doctor told him he wouldn’t remember his wife’s name by 2005.

Details and words escape him – but not Yolanda’s name. Andy sometimes even forgets why he goes to his front door until the doorbell rings a second time, but Yolanda’s painstaking daily schedules keep him on task and he writes down nearly everything. Andy battles the disease with the same determination he showed nearly 30 years before.

‘Like I was reincarnated’

As we drive through flat, endless farmland in Central Washington, I realize this reunion is as much a part of Andy’s therapy as the pills he takes twice a day. The weekend energizes him, and the man who brought us together to say goodbye talks about his future.

He and Yolanda already are making plans to move to Spokane. Andy will be closer to most of his Fiji brothers, and Yolanda has a good friend who lives there.

“I’m going to forget everything and everybody as my Alzheimer’s advances,” Andy says. “When I start to go south, she’s going to need help.”

We talk about how fast 30 years passed. How careers, families and life pulled us apart. How Andy’s illness brought us back together and showed us it doesn’t have to be that way.

As Andy starts to speak again, I turn down the music.

“It was almost like I was reincarnated,” he says of the reunion. “It helped me assemble pieces of my life I could never get back again. I was able to recover memories, conversations, smells, voices, places I used to walk. I did it all one more time.

“When I was standing up there in the Gold Room looking at every one of your faces, I was feeling emotions I hadn’t felt in 30 years,” he says, his eyes filling with tears and his voice choking with emotion. “The reunion brought me back to life.”

We ride in silence for a while, lost in our thoughts. As I slide in a CD, I realize Andy is speaking for all of his brothers.