Steven Cornelius was born and raised in Northeast Mississippi and is married to a beautiful, auburn haired second generation Irish woman with deep roots in Galway and Sligo. His love of books began at a very early age. When night fell on the farm and chores for the day were complete, he and his family sat around the fire and read until bedtime. Many of his childhood adventures are featured in his writing. He attended the University of Mississippi, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees while participating in Air Force ROTC. Steve completed more than thirty years Air Force service in the US and overseas. For the Distant Traveler Trilogy, he drew upon experiences and memories collected during assignments around the world. After retiring in 2015, Steve decided to get serious about a lifelong passion for writing. His most recent work has been published in Mississippi magazine (October 2022) and Louisiana Living (November 2022). He just finished a multicultural novel set in Cuba and Houston Texas featuring Hispanics as the main characters. Steve has written one hundred and five short stories collected in two volumes and posted stories on the Mississippi Folklore and True Appalachia webpages and has a following of more than 3,000 regular followers on each page.
Saying Goodbye to My Friend Joe
By Steven Cornelius
I first met Joe at Teledyne Brown Engineering when we both worked there. Over the course of several years, we wound up serving together on a number of ad hoc committees convened to tackle one corporate challenge or another. I don’t remember much about what our goals were or the outcome from countless hours spent in windowless rooms, with everyone talking in circles, but Joe certainly made an impression on me. He was smart, articulate and if he believed he was right, stood his ground no matter what the issue or who challenged him, including the Teledyne CEO.
As I would learn over our thirty year friendship, Joe had unbending integrity; the deep and pure character that comes from ”being raised right” by strict but loving parents. Joe developed a sense of honor, self-confidence and conviction from an early age. Through hard work on a mountain farm, he learned how to treat people. All the while, an unshakable belief in what is true and right grew inside him.
About three years into our budding friendship, I applied and was accepted into Vanderbilt University’s School of Engineering, with the goal of a Masters or Doctorate Degree in Engineering Management. One day, on a drive by visit in Joe’s office, I excitedly told him of my pending adventure in Nashville. That is when I learned that Joe was a Vandy alum. He was as excited for me as if it were him starting all over again. Joe couldn’t have been more helpful, offering advice and making phone calls on my behalf. I have never known a man who knew more people or was as well respected as Joe.
As I progressed through my degree program, I often invited Joe to ride to Nashville with me and introduced him to the several Electrical Engineering faculty members. About a year later, I was not the least bit surprised when Joe was offered an adjunct professor position teaching management principles, which he did for several years. Joe and I really got to know each other riding back and forth from Ardmore, Alabama to the Vanderbilt campus, which we did probably a couple dozen times, maybe more. He was a great traveling companion because, like me, he had stored up a lot of life stories and was very good at spinning a yarn.
During those four hour round trips, we covered the waterfront, talking about everything under the sun. Over time, I was able to interest Joe in a robotics project I was neck deep in working on. Joe became a great help opening doors and introducing me to engineers at Teledyne who had similar interests. The one thing Joe didn’t tolerate was gratuitous use of profanity, which I most certainly was guilty of doing, every single day. Entering the Army before I turned eighteen, I learned from the masters of the craft: crusty old NCOs who could weave a tapestry of vulgarity into any conversation, using profanity as adjective, verb and adverb and sometimes as a proper noun.
During one trip up and back, Joe had invited Ray, Teledyne’s white haired chief scientist to accompany us to see a lab demonstration of a semi-autonomous robotic arm as it performed a number of critical and delicate tasks, including feeding a paraplegic and turning dials and flipping on/off switches on a simulated nuclear reactor control panel. On the return trip from Vanderbilt, Ray asked me to give a recap and summary assessment of how I felt things had gone. I did so, giving what I thought was a good technical description, but one that was sprinkled liberally with profanity to emphasize those points I considered critical.
When I finished, Joe and Ray, both very religious men, spent five minutes talking about how much they disliked the gratuitous use of profanity. I endured their veiled criticism in silence, but their comments touched a nerve, stinging and embarrassing me and, frankly, making me really mad. After they fell silent, I took a deep breath and added, “Well, all I know is that profanity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker.” An uncomfortable thirty second silence ensued and then both men howled with laughter.
For months afterward, when I passed either man in the hallway at Teledyne, they would point at me and burst into laughter saying something along the lines of…”Profanity is the crutch.” I left Teledyne after almost eight years, seeking other opportunities, moving my family west of the Mississippi and didn’t communicate much with Joe for several years. About ten or eleven years later, I returned to the greater Huntsville area and reached out reconnecting with Joe. We developed a very pleasant routine of eating lunch once a month at the West End Grill, sitting for a couple of hours eating a tasty meal while solving all the world’s problems.
Once we had straightened out all those thorny challenges, Joe would head back to his home and wife, south of the Tennessee River in Alabama, while I drove back to my beautiful bride and our home nestled in the edge of Tennessee. I was happy to see my friend month after month for the next five years and then with no explanation, Joe stopped answering my email and texts. I naturally assumed and made an educated guess that, given that he was well past seventy, Joe was experiencing health issues. It was almost two years before I learned the rest of the story, so to speak. As it turned out, Joe had suffered a massive heart attack while he and his wife were out for dinner one night and underwent emergency quadruple bypass surgery. A long and difficult recovery followed, including at least one terrible relapse during which he suffered a crippling stroke.
Over the ensuing weeks, I learned more of the story, bit by bit. I felt terrible for him because I just knew that Joe found the rehab and recovery excruciating, if for no other reason than he couldn’t spend an afternoon immersed in a good book. A reverential love of the written word was one of the first common touch points that quickly cemented our strong and affectionate friendship. About once a month, I sent a text or email to Joe. To my surprise and amazement one Sunday afternoon he replied to a text enthusiastically accepting my invitation to lunch at the West End Grill. Naturally, I was delighted and began making plans to meet my friend in three days’ time.
About an hour later, I received another text from his wife asking that I call her cell phone as soon as possible, which I immediately did. It didn’t take long for her to fill me in on how Joe was really doing. Apparently, the stroke after the open heart surgery had triggered a long dormant dementia switch deep inside his brain and Joe was regressing rapidly. She invited me to come to their home for a visit and we quickly agreed that I should come down the following Tuesday. That visit turned into a bittersweet goodbye.
It was hard to see my friend in the situation that I guess we must all eventually face. He had regressed to the childlike state of a ten year old. He was sweet, talkative and pleasant to be around, but he asked me at least three times, “Where do I know you from?” As we sat on their back patio, he smiled and asked, “Do you like to fish?” I smiled and nodded, adding, “It has been years since I held a fishing rod.” Joe paused for a few seconds and then told me about the last time he went fishing outside of Asheville, North Carolina, catching a mess of rainbow trout. As Joe talked, I realized he was remembering a fishing trip he took as a boy, visiting a mountain stream near where he grew up.
A cold autumn wind swirling around their back patio drove us inside and after taking a seat, Joe looked at his wife of forty years, asking, “What is for dessert?” His wife served Joe a slice of delicious pecan pie and he ate his portion with the gusto and pleasure of a young boy, yummy sounds and all. Knowing his love of the written word, I carried several books with me as a gift, and he was gracious in accepting them, but after just a few minutes of conversation, it was obvious that he would never touch any of the three adult level books I’d brought.
Because of aggressive and merciless dementia, my friend Joe, proud Alabama alumnus with a Ph.D. in Management and Strategic Planning had forever returned to his childhood in the mountains of North Carolina, never to return to the present. When I said goodbye, he walked me to the door, asking, “Who are you again? Why did you come all this way to see me?” I gave my old and dear friend a hug and quickly drove away. It was a long sad drive back home but I was glad I made the trip. About three months later, I received a text from Joe’s wife. I called and she told me that Joe had passed. His cremated remains are now spread across his beloved North Carolina Blueridge Mountains. I still mourn the loss of my good friend.
The Galway Review 