“I am I, Don Quixote,
The Lord of La Mancha,
My destiny calls and I go.”

Without looking up, Saoirse grabs a green mug off the back counter and pulls his coffee. She pours the cream and checks the volume in the sugar bowl. Not full enough. She tops it off, then pushes it all over to Ula, who brings it over to where Ron and Jeanne are sitting.

“And the wild winds of fortune
Will carry me onward
Oh, whithersoever they blow.”

Jeanne joins him. Ula stands and waits until they’re finished. Jeanne’s drink order changes week to week. Ron’s is always the same. Plain ol’ cuppa joe, lots of cream and lots and lots and lots of sugar.

If this were a bar, you’d think they were drunk.

“You hear that Bobby?” Ron shouts over the din of the cafe and back to the kitchen. “That’s your part!”

Bob turns off the dish sprayer and leans out the pass through.

“What’s that?”

“Man of La Mancha!” Ron shouts and jubilantly foists his fists into the air.

Jeanne rolls her eyes and smiles, jabbing her thumb in his direction. “He woke up this way,” she shakes her head. “He says we gotta do it.”

“Do what?!” I lean out next to Bob, one skeptical eyebrow raised.

“Man of La Mancha!” Ron shouts again. “For The Theater Project! We could do it! Look at your guy! He’s Don Quixote!” I let my eyes travel up Bob’s full length before staring back out at Ron. I am only just recovering from the entire family’s last foray into The Theater Project’s production of A Christmas Carol.

“He’s my dishwasher!” I retort. I’m not sure how I feel about losing my husband to more nighttime rehearsals, about working bleary eyed in the cafe after more late night performances.

Week after week this goes on. One Saturday Jeanne’s gone and Ron sits up at the espresso bar, singing:

“To dream…the impossible dream
To fight…the unbeatable foe…
To bear…with unbearable sorrow
To run…where the brave dare not go…”

If you ask me, Man of La Mancha sounds like the most cornball production ever written. I read Don Quixote over twenty years ago. Nothing there struck me as musical material. I couldn’t figure out whether it was tragic, comic, or powerfully optimistic. In my young adulthood I was deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity like that, so I closed the book and thought little of it after. But now I think about it. And I think Ron’s idea is terrible.
But he doesn’t let up. Week after week he comes into the cafe singing.

“This is my quest, to follow that star…
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far…”

Finally, one night we stream the movie starring Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren.

It drags so much, it takes us two nights to get through it.

Two nights to think about this character with the droopy mustache.

Two nights to consider the power of seeing the world not as it is, but as it could be.

Two nights to ponder the character of Aldonza, and her journey to learn to believe in herself, with the help of one crazy old guy who can’t accept the world for what it is.

“Dulcinea,” Ron sings to me one morning as I’m clearing his plates. “I have sought thee, sung thee, dreamed thee, Dulcinea!”

“Like hell,” I call over my shoulder.
“Let’s hear it Shannon. Do it!”

I don’t sing anymore. Except at home. I don’t do plays. I was a painfully shy kid when I first met the stage. I was in fourth grade and had befriended Lisa, one of Ron and Jeanne’s daughters. They pushed us both up there, where I learned to use my voice and push through my fears and introversion until the day came when my self consciousness about singing on stage stamped out my songs, my introversion won out, and my need to write took over.

And when that happened, Ron stepped out in front, leaping up to capture each of my words as they flew from my mind, reading them, saving them, cheering for more, for more, for more.

But the truth is, it’s just as scary to put words to paper as it is to sing in front of an audience. What if the ideas are scorned? What if no one wants to read them?

But I knew I always had one reader. When I struggled most bringing my ideas out to the world, I knew there was one guy out there who wanted to hear them.

Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he was visionary. But he believed in me.

And so I wrote.

And from out of that believing came a writer.

And then Bob and I wanted to build a cafe. And we didn’t want to do it down in the village. We wanted to do it up in the mountains, in our tiny hamlet that had been given up to history. And we needed to sell the idea, and we needed to raise money to do it. So we reached out to our friends and farm customers and asked them to buy ceremonial coffee mugs at one hundred dollars each to help pay for the espresso machine.

Ron and Jeanne bought the first mugs.

And we didn’t know if anyone would like the food. And we didn’t know if anyone would drive up the mountain.

But we knew two people wanted to come out for coffee at our place.

And they believed in us.

And so we built.

And from out of that believing came a cafe.

They believed in my daughters and pulled them onto the stage, cheering at their tiny parts, cheering at their jokes in the cafe, cheering at their crazy outfits, cheering, believing, cheering, believing until, from out of all that cheering and believing, grew these two beautiful, creative, funny young women.

They thought Bob made the funniest faces, that he could tell a whole story with one wave of his hand. They believed him up onto a stage and into the hearts of countless new friends.

And so one afternoon while making soup in the cafe, I listen to an entire recording of Man of La Mancha. And I fall in love with it. So I listen again. And with Ron’s words of encouragement in my head, I begin to sing…

 

And as my kitchen fills with the scent of sautéing onions and garlic, my voice swells until I am certain anyone who pulls into the parking lot can hear my song as it drifts up through the vents and out into the world.

And I’m no great singer.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is that someone believes just enough to let me unleash my voice and try. And in that trying, in that moment of believing, my heart soars in this rapture where the impossible is possible, where joy is present, where life is eternal.

The song will end. My voice will give out.

But I had the moment.

And it is in that singing when I realize the magic that is Ron Cleeve: to believe every impossible dream. Because it is in that believing, in that striving, that we are most alive.

Nine weeks after his diagnosis with leukemia, Ron lost his fight. He passed from this world on Sunday. And one moment, I’m fine. I’m relieved his suffering is finished. And in the next, I’m so damn sad.

The world has lost a great knight-errant. He believed in the impossible inside every person he met. And for his love of adventure and believing, the world has been made a better place. Go in peace, Ron Cleeve.

All right, here’s the thing. 2020 has Brought so much loss all over the planet. I don’t think there is anyone who hasn’t been touched this year.

As some of you know, our family has always celebrated Samhain on October 31. It is a day when we give thanks for the animals who give their lives for our health, and it is a day when those who have gone before us are believed to come back for a visit.

This year Samhain falls on a Saturday. We would like to use that Saturday at the cafe to honor the dead. We will have a Samhain altar set up there, with photos of those we have lost this year. Ron’s photo will be among them. If you are in town and you wish to add a photo to the Samhain altar, please come by and do so. All prepared food sales from that day will be donated to Ron’s family to help offset their medical expenses.

 

Photo courtesy of Jeanne Christiansen.