Michael L. Fiedler

prelude to an obituary….

Michael Lynn Fiedler is dead from a heart attack day before yesterday.  As far as I’m concerned, the universe, God, everything in it, is but a damn shade of what it used to be.  I feel sad. 

In my younger years, I lived a few yards from Michael’s at Fort Missoula (right after I was born.)  Michael loved me and I loved him.

His life was messy, scary even.  But then again, if you looked very closely, his life transmogrified into one that was well-ordered, crystalline.  I like both views. 

He showed up in my plain Montana life in his own way, at his own time.  We shouted, we argued.  I trembled because he seemed to be a wild man!  I swear he wasn’t a wild man. 

In fact, he told me he was writing a book about his experiences with Alan Ginsberg, Philip Roth, other intellectual heavyweights of the 60s-80s.  We can digress later.  Michael’s father, Leslie Fiedler, was the real heavyweight.  We can digress again.  Forgive me while I cry in an ugly way.

At the last, most recently, Michael was living with good friends who looked out for his interests.  I met them a few years ago and I was satisfied that Michael was safe.  We sat in back of his house in Missoula and drank wine.  Michael was fond of the grape.  Me too!  I have pictures.

Let’s go back to the beginning. You can skip ahead if you like.

I met Michael in 1952.  No.  I likely met Michael in 1949, the year I was born, but I don’t recall the meeting.  Michael and probably some of his family members went to Kalispell, Montana, to my grandparent’s house in — 1952?  Certainly not 1953, because my father died that year of cancer.  I remember the time, so I must have been at least two years old?  That would be 1952, in the Fall.

Michael was a chubby kid who liked pickles.  He and I ran around everything there was to run around at my grandparent’s five-acre orchard.

I’ll pursue Michael’s story later.