Eye on Everett – Everett Leader Herald

— Eye on Everett —

Josh Resnek and the Blue Suit discuss Josh’s trip to Croatia last week…and everything that happened. It was quite the trip with some twists and turns the Blue Suit got out of Josh that reveal magical excursions to gorgeous faraway places sometimes comes at a very high price.

I showed the Blue Suit the above photograph of a guy sitting on the ferry as it made its way across the Adriatic from the former Greek and Roman ancient place called Split to Vis in the nation of Croatia. I took my family there for a wedding last week. It was quite a week.”

“What made it quite a week?” the Blue Suit asked me.

“First off, on day one when we got to London, one of my daughters lost her passport, her debit and credit cards and all her identification. She couldn’t travel with us. All our flights were cancelled – which we had already paid for, and three more flights had to be paid for me, my wife and my daughter who didn’t lose her passport. Then we had to put my daughter up in London as we made our way to Croatia for a family wedding. The new flights were about $800. The cancelled flights were about $800. Another $800 was added on for the air bnb we found for my daughter who couldn’t leave the country and for eating money because she’d have to be in London to go to the US Embassy to get a replacement passport just to be able to go home! We made many calls, frantic calls to the US Embassy. We arrived there like good soldiers at 8:00am in the morning the next day as were instructed to do only to find the embassy was closed on Monday – more trains and busses and Ubers and meals and wasted time on calls and … you just have to know that vaping and playing games on a cell should not be allowed to translate into losing your passport and everything else.”

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— Eye on Everett —

Discussions between the Blue Suit and Josh Resnek about everything Everett done weekly. The Blue Suit is the only cloth suit we know of speaking to a member of the local press about politics, money, and everything else under the sun. He is much more than a cloth suit. He has let us know this many times. He is closer than most of us to the knowing of the essence of why everything happens here the way it does.

This week the Blue Suit talks to me about life, about his life. He wonders what might have been had he chosen a different path or that is, if his path hadn’t been chosen for him when he flew off the rack at a lesser department store more than a decade ago.

Mind you, he isn’t sorry about his existence. He is, however, concerned about his future.

“The city is an entirely changed place,” the Blue Suit said to me.

“How so?” I asked in reply.

“Just look around, Josh. Gee whiz. You’ve been around as long as the dinosaurs. Tell me you haven’t noticed the changes,” he demanded.

“Obviously, you haven’t been reading your Leader Herald from week to week,” I answered. “If you had been reading it, you would have noticed how we are treating the future as it is staring us in the face. I believe it is a pretty honest look without any bluster,” I said to the Blue Suit.

“You’ve got a point there, Josh,” he said to me.

He cleared his throat, coughed up a big amount of phlegm, and then he put the window down and with a powerful explosion shooting out of his mouth, spit it into the street where we were driving.

“My God, that was disgusting,” I said to the Blue Suit. “Can you imagine hitting someone with that!” I exclaimed.

“You want me to do it again, Josh?” he asked me.

“Please, not again. Anything but that,” I answered.

We were just cruising around to nowhere. That’s not a bad cruise at times if you need to get your head on straight but can’t find a way to do it.

“It’s really different here from just ten years ago,” the Blue Suit said.

“How so?” I asked him.

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— Eye on Everett —

Editor Josh Resnek discussing everything about Everett with the Blue Suit, Everett’s most famous off the rack blue suit

The Blue Suit returned to Everett after spending a week in the White Mountains in the town of Bethlehem. He loves Bethlehem, which has become a town populated almost entirely by Hassidic Jews. For two weeks, he studied the Talmud, the Jewish law. He also ate Jewish food and followed all Jewish customs and rules. The Hasids, as they are known, are extremely devout, almost radically devoted to their religion and to God.

Tuesday afternoon the Blue Suit recounted a chance meeting with Councilor Wayne Matewsky in great detail.

“Wayne loves me,” he said. “We’ve been pals for years. He is always there for me. He is loyal. He understands how the world works in Everett. I value his judgment,” the Blue Suit said to me.

“Where did you meet Wayne?” I asked the Blue Suit.

“We just ran into one another on Vine Street,” he said. “Wayne was doing errands in his Mercedes. I was standing around waiting for you.”

“Wayne rolled down the driver’s side window, smiled broadly at me and held out his hand. We shook hands. It’s always good to see Wayne. I mean we’ve been close for almost 15 years. He’s the real thing…the longest serving councilor in the city still serving in office. I mean he’s got staying power!” the Blue Suit said.

“Wayne and I talked with one another. He told me he was feel- ing tired. He was in the hospital recently with pneumonia. Everyone knows about the heart attack he had last year. That almost killed him. It’s hard to kill someone like Wayne. He’s a fighter, a very resilient guy. Anyway, we traded some secrets which I will not be repeating to you because a secret can’t be a secret if I talk about it with someone else.”

I tried to imagine what Wayne and the Blue Suit might have talked about, and what secrets they traded. In the end, I decided to let them share their secrets.

I know Wayne pretty well. I talked with him recently myself. He said he was thinking about not running again. I don’t believe he will give up his seat no matter how tired he feels. We’ll see soon enough as papers for the upcoming election will shortly be available.

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— Eye on Everett —

(Blue Suit is on vacation)
A thought piece

Heroism and bravery motivate some, mysteriously evades others

I am moved by stories about heroism. I cannot fathom how some people can be so heroic in their lives. How do people rise to such heights for others? What causes some of us to fight and or to die with bravery so others can live or be saved from destruction and others of us to never make a bold move in that direction?

I don’t feel there is much heroic about my existence. What should I have done to be heroic? What could I have done to be heroic? Maybe I should have gone to Vietnam instead of feeling so relieved that I failed my pre-induction physical at Fort Holabird Maryland in 1970. Had I passed, my long head of hair would have been shaved within a half hour of passing the physical. I would have been processed, inducted and sworn in. I would have been on my way to Fort Dix for six weeks of basic training that night before being shipped to the meat factory in Vietnam.

I failed my physical. I got out of serving in Vietnam. My life’s journey remained uninterrupted. I returned to Washington DC that night where I was at college. I celebrated my freedom with my roommates that night. I was relieved. We went to the Anthony House, a club in downtown DC. We got stoned. We drank. We picked up women – or they picked us up. We returned to our home in North West Washington at a time of American Empire when our lives stretched before us like an endless dream.

It is difficult to remember a great many details about these days of my life now so much a part of a vanishing past. A few of the most poignant and significant moments of the day remain vivid. The memorable bus ride to Ft. Holabird from DC, down the Beltway, with many of us staring out at the American pastoral passing us by is an indelible moment. The bus packed with inner city Blacks and me, the only white man seated at the back of the bus, alone, clutching a stack of doctor’s letters. I did not want to pass the physical. I was interested in war and US History, great battles and generals, heroic moments on battlefields far and wide. But I did not want to serve in Vietnam. I wasn’t alone on that bus as it sped to Baltimore on a hot summer day in July. Several young Black men, weak and drug addicted, needed help to walk up the steps into the bus as it loaded up. One of them moaned again and again. “I don’t want to go to Vietnam.” The Black bus driver tried soothing him. “Don’t worry, my man, you won’t be making it to Vietnam,” he said to him. His moaning didn’t stop. About a half dozen young men rode to Maryland passed out where they sat. There was not much chatter. No laughter. This was a bad ride into the abyss for most of the young inner city men on this bus.

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— Eye on Everett —

About everything Everett from the vantage point of an off the rack cloth blue suit.

“There you go again, Josh, trying to make out like I’m not human but in reality I am a cloth blue suit – off the rack no less! Where do you get off bringing me down like this? I mean, I’ve got a life of my own. I’m as real as you are. I live and breathe the way you do. I know more than you do about Everett politics and intrigue. You know this, yet you try to make like I’m a figment of your imagination. Stop it, please,” the Blue Suit said to me Tuesday afternoon.

I was driving him in my Lexus to a dental appointment – yes – the Blue Suit was going to an extraction. He wasn’t feeling very good about this. A local dentist examined him a week ago, said he needed a double root canal and then a crown. He was going to pay about $1,800 to save the tooth when he made a decision. He told me about it. It went like this:

“I don’t have that long to go in my life to spend almost $2,000 for a ceramic crown,” he told me. “It’s a tooth way back so no one can see it will be gone,” he added. “You know how vain I am. As long as the space left by the missing tooth can’t be seen, I don’t mind,” he said.

He was pretty glum. He didn’t like losing a tooth any more than he liked his suit pants being torn and ripped after a bad fall on a patch of ice last year.

“That was pretty bad,” he recalled. “Tears, rips, stains, holes and the such in my pants or my suit jacket are impossible to live with,” he added.

Last year, after many years of solid service and wear and tear, he spent two weeks at a local laundry where he was fully rehabilitated.

His torn pockets were sewn back into form. His failing zipper on his pants was replaced. Missing buttons and loose buttons were sewn tight. In a major rebuild, the fine silk black lining of the suit jacket was entirely replaced, sewn with great care to look like new.

Suit collars always take a beating if the suit is worn all the time. The Blue Suit’s collar was steam cleaned and buffed up, and pressed just so.

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