Dave Wood

“Death be not proud, though some have called

Thee mighty and dreadful

For thou art not so, for those whom thou thinks thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”

--John Donne, Holy Sonnets

Well I guess there’s some comfort in that from the priest of the 17th century. Nevertheless, we’ve recently been bombarded with deaths too close for us to take lightly. Funerals crowd in on us with seemingly blinding speed. Like our next door neighbor, professor Jim Pratt, debater extraordinaire. There’s James Palmquist, M.D., a bon vivant, Swedish apologist, and fellow free coffee drinker at Family Fresh (I told you he was Swedish!).

I also can’t forget my friend, Connie Strand of Fountain City, a docent at the Winona Seafaring Museum and one of the wittiest math teachers I’ve ever known. And we’ll never again see the imposing maestro, Elliot Wold, sitting in his favorite corner booth at the Copper Kettle, dining on a big steak on a T-bone Tuesday. We can’t even see the Copper Kettle because it’s dead too!

Just when I begin to think that deaths will be dying down, I pick up the Sunday Star-Tribune obituary section and gaze through its 10 pages, looking superstitiously at those who died at age 87, which I have turned this year. I didn’t get further than the C’s when I ran into the name of a dear old friend, Dave Colwell, who just happened to die at age 87.

Dave and I didn’t have much in common, but his dying made me think of the life he led in his 87 years; and that made me a bit envious of a life well-chosen.

Dave was an heir to Colwell Publishing in Minneapolis, a giant in the Twin Cities. But upon graduating from his beloved Carleton College, he chose not to participate in the printing world, but preferred to dabble in teaching, being an officer of the Children’s Home Society, and flying all over the world to shuttle orphans to stable homes in the U.S. Dave loved entertainment, and whenever one wanted to run into him, all one had to do was go to Orchestra Hall on a Friday night, and Dave would be there, chatting it up, clad in his always natty attire. Sunday? The opera at the Ordway—chatting it up again.

His wife, Char, died years ago, and he lived with his adopted son and daughter Holly in a modest home on the banks of Minnehaha Creek in Edina. Dave grew up in the fancy area above the old Guthrie Theater and remembered when the Nobel Prize winner, Sinclair Lewis, was his neighbor. Dave told wonderful tales of the antics of that cranky old scribe.

I’m fairly certain Dave regretted his son’s decision not to attend his beloved Carleton, but didn’t whimper when the kid chose Marquette University, sort of a “Reformation Bowl” decision.
“Marquette doesn’t even look like a university,” he told me.

He loved his daughter Holly, who had Down’s Syndrome but didn’t suffer fools gladly (she had a way of looking at you that let you know you were probably making a fool of yourself). Dave insisted that she mainstream through Edina High School. When Holly graduated, she went right to work washing dishes at McDonald’s and lived independently. When she had saved enough money, she treated the widower Dave to a Mark Twain Paddleboat ride down the Mississippi, recompense for Dave’s constant attention to her as a daughter and a Special Olympics skating medalist.

Dave never failed to be amused and loving about Holly’s special attributes. Yet he was taken aback a bit when he saw her take second place in a skating competition at Duluth and petulantly stomped her skate on the ice. Dave laughed about that but said to his friends with some chagrin: “She’s 30 years old for god’s sake.”

On another occasion during our frequent lunches at the Little Wagon, he told the fellows about his trip with Holly to a B. Dalton’s bookstore. “A friend ran into me and asked where Holly was. I replied, ‘She’s over in the James Joyce section, speed reading “Ulysses.’”

That was Dave, and now he’s gone too, along with the Little Wagon. Our favorite memento from him is frog sprinkler, a gift from Dave, a dabbler who dabbled right: with intensity, wit, and humor.

Dave Wood would like to hear from you. Call him at 715-441-2081.