I recognize the expression on the face of that handsome
fellow pictured above. It’s the face he puts on when he knows he’s being fed a
line of BS by some politician or public official.
I’m familiar with Mike’s expressions because we grew up
together and were lifelong friends. Mike passed away a few days ago. For the
last four decades Mike had been a reporter, then became an editor for a New
York City newspaper, the Staten Island Advance.
We’d both fulfilled the dreams of our youth to live and
work in a big city. Mike’s venue was New York, mine was Los Angeles.
When Mike’s wife, Barbara, called to give me the shocking
news that Mike was suddenly in the last stages of life, it rocked my world. He
passed away the next day. We were only five months apart in age, both only
beginning to enjoy the “six Saturdays and a Sunday” lifestyle of retirement.
It seemed impossible that Mike was gone so quickly. Just a
few days before he passed, we’d had another lengthy online chat about our
youthful adventures growing up together in a small town in Wisconsin. Mike was
starting to compile some of those stories from our Tom Sawyer-like youth, with
an eye toward actually publishing them.
Staten Island Advance Photo
He was a highly accomplished writer. I was always jealous
of his ability to craft a compelling narrative. I salved my feelings by telling
myself Mike’s special talent was writing, mine was music, and we were both pretty
good at what we did.
How unusual that two boys who grew up in a small town in
the Midwest spent much of their adult lives on opposite ends of the nation and
wound up living a short commute apart – Mike in Staten Island, me in
Bridgeport, Connecticut.
We met in first grade and bonded immediately. Endless
summers of sleeping out under the stars; rowing our boat around the lake our little
village was built around; camping on the island in the middle of the lake; neighborhood
baseball games that went on until it was too dark to see the ball; going to Boy
Scout camp in the northwoods for a week in the summer; and, eventually, off to
college, a hundred miles apart.
Through all the travels and stops along the way as our professional careers advanced, we both remained proud of our small-town Wisconsin roots. In the photo above, Mike and his daughter Mara are seen pitching in to help clean up a Staten Island beach many years ago.
Michael W. Dominowski is survived by his wife, Barbara; their daughter Mara
and her husband and two darling grandchildren; and a lifelong friend
contemplating his own mortality.
