Eulogy for Ivan Szlapetis

It’s June 9th, and as I write this I sit in a spot on a bluff overlooking the Red Deer river in Drumheller, Alberta, about 150km northeast of Calgary.  There’s a suspension footbridge down below that you have to cross to get here.  It’s a spot of some historic significance.  Not to the world at large, but certainly to me, and I think probably to Ivan as well.  I’ll explain later.

Ivan and I met in September of 1987, thirty years ago.  How time flies, as they say.  We were assigned to be roommates in our first year of university.  We were lucky in that many of the guys on our same floor wound up hating their roommates.  We, on the other hand, became fast friends and soon best friends, supporting and helping each other all the way through our university years.

One of the things I quickly learned about Ivan was that he had a boundless reserve of imagination and creativity.  Anyone who has seen the kinds of things he has built for the enjoyment of his family at Halloween or Christmas knows exactly what I’m talking about.

In 2nd year we rented a house with a few other friends where we soon realized we had an unwelcome guest in the form of a mouse living somewhere in my room.  What to do?  We had to catch it, but neither of us had the heart to hurt it.  I recalled the design of a harm-free mousetrap that I had seen once in Canadian Tire and I described the design to him.  It was a square tube with a bend in it, open at one end, with a spring-loaded door.  The idea was that you would put the bait at the far end of the tube.  Then you would open the door and set the tube on the ground so that the bent part was angled off the ground.  When the mouse crawled in it would have to crawl up the slope of the bent part of the tube to get the cheese, and when it did so the tube would tilt and the door would slam shut.  Voila!  So did we go to Canadian Tire and get one?  Heck no!  We were starving students.  The only kind of money we had was beer money, and everyone knows Canadian Tire only accepts Canadian Tire money.  So my first thought was to build something like that out of wood, but we didn’t have any wood.  Or tools.  Or stuff to hold it together.  So I was stumped.  But the next morning Ivan came out of his room with the very thing I had described – bigger, and not very pretty, but definitely recognizable as a mousetrap.  He’d been up all night building it (cramming all night was a specialty of his) out of pieces of crazy carpet, staples, and elastic.  We didn’t know if it would work, but that very day we arrived home from school and we had our mouse, completely unharmed, but probably pretty freaked out.  And it was adorable!  So we walked a few houses down the street, and let it out of the trap into someone else’s yard, patting ourselves on the back for a job well done and a life saved.  [sidenote:  I told that story to someone a few years ago and they looked at me without a hint of a smile and said “So you made the mouse someone else’s problem.”  Well, we weren’t thinking about that when we did it, but yeah I guess we did.  Anyway, the point isn’t about the mouse or the disgruntled neighbour.  The point is that Ivan was creative!  Try to keep up.]

There was also the time where we entered an air band contest and it was Ivan’s idea to build and paint a huge Gary Larson, Far Side cow to act as one of our backup singers.  During yet another all-nighter, he photocopied a cartoon onto a transparency, and then snuck into a lecture room to make use of the overhead projector, where he projected the image onto a large sheet of cardboard, traced it, cut it out, and painted it.  The most genius part, though, was that he wanted to make its mouth move. I and the rest of our gang thought it was getting too complicated and poo-pooed the idea saying it was good enough as it was.  To have a giant Far Side cow standing behind us while we did our song was going to be funny enough, and far beyond what anyone else was likely to do.  But he was adamant it had to be done.  So he cut the jaw off of his cardboard creation, punched a hole through it where the hinge was to be and at the corresponding spot on the head, and then ran a pipe cleaner through the two holes to hold the parts together.  Then he rigged an elastic to pull the mouth shut and attached a string to the chin.  Now when you pulled the string the mouth would open and when you let it go it would close.  We were all duly impressed.  The cow sang with us that night and it was brilliant.  While we sang our song and the cow did its thing the crowd roared.  I have never felt so cool. But at the end of the competition the judges polled the audience to see who they liked best.  And when they called out our band’s name — we were called “The Cold Willies” — everyone started shouting “Boooo!  Booooooo!”  We were stunned and more than a little confused, and I think the judges were too.  We ended up getting 2nd place – I’m pretty sure because the judges did a quick swap when they heard the reaction.  It was only afterward when our friends gathered around to congratulate us that we learned that what they had actually been shouting was “Mooooo!  Moooooo!”  We were thrilled.  And the 2nd place prizes were better than the first place ones anyway.  We did alright.

After university, years passed and we still kept in touch, although I have to say I feel he was a far better friend to me than I was to him.  I let him down many times, but he was always willing to forgive and forget.  I think he felt that time and friendship were too precious to waste on petty grievances.  Which brings me to the other thing I admired about him:  he had a greater lust for life – a joie de vivre – than I will ever have.  He had an inner glow of happiness that infected everyone around him.  It was always there just under the surface, waiting to burst out in a guffaw of laughter.

I learned of Ivan’s passing this morning, June 9th.  After bawling my eyes out in the office boardroom, I didn’t know what to do, so I got in my car and I started driving.  I didn’t know to where, but I soon found myself on the way to Drumheller.  And as I drove I remembered something that we did there – one of my simple and great memories of him.

Some years ago – before kids – he and Kim were in Calgary for a visit, and I brought them to this spot for a little site-seeing.  And as we walked across the suspension bridge Ivan and I looked up at the bluff above and one of us said “Wouldn’t it be hilarious to hang a moon from up there?”  I honestly don’t remember which of us floated that idea, but I definitely remember both of us immediately grasping the brilliance of it.  So we scrambled up the slope together like giddy school children and reached the top.  And when the backs of the other tourists were turned and we sensed our moment, we both dropped our shorts, bent over, and showed our bare rear ends to the world.  It was glorious.  And Kim, the willing accomplice who remained at the foot of the bluff, captured the grim photographic evidence.  I have that photo somewhere, but unfortunately couldn’t find it in time.  Maybe that’s a good thing.

I have never been brazen or bold enough to do anything like that again.  It’s the kind of thing I could only have done with Ivan.  And I think there is no better moment in the thirty years I knew him that quite captures the joy of what it felt like to be with him.

Ivan was the best kind of friend, and the best kind of person:  always giving more than he received, and always willing to forgive and forget.  He was my best friend and my brother.  I feel blessed to have known him, and I will miss him dearly.

Sleep well, my friend.  I love you.