Goodbye My Friend: Terrie Carolan Tribute

By Larry Carlin

November 3, 2024

My name is Larry Carlin, but I am not a member of the Minnesota family. While we shared the same last name (until he changed the spelling a couple of decades back), there is no known blood relationship between Terrie and me. Both of our ancestors came from the old country, with his family hailing from County Antrim and mine from County Mayo. His immediate family is from Minnesota, while mine is from Pennsylvania. Yet when we were first introduced we found out that we had a lot in common.

With neither of us being real bus drivers, we met in San Francisco in the summer of 1983 while we were both driving tour buses to supplement our personal interests. I believe he was studying economics at the time, and I was playing music. Neither of which profession, I might add, usually provides a steady income. I’ll never forget the day in July when I walked into the bus company office to hand in some paperwork and the secretary said, “Hey, we just hired your brother Terry!” I was immediately taken aback, as not only did I have a brother named Terry, I also have a younger brother named Marty who also drove buses for a while. But both were living on the East Coast at that time.

“My brother Terry?” I asked, a bit confused. The woman smiled and said, “Yes, your brother Terry from Minnesota. Actually, he’s not really your brother, but he does have the same last name.” When I heard this, I immediately thought to myself, “I’ve got to meet this guy.”

Unable to find the exact date that we first met while looking through my journal from back then, I do recall that when I first encountered him in the drivers’ room that he wasn’t a typical bus driver. He was dressed very neatly, he was fit, his hair was a little long, he had a beard, piercing blue eyes, and a softspoken demeanor. We chatted briefly, and I found out that we were around the same age, his father’s name was also James, there were a lot of Jims and Tims in his family, that he played the flute, that he spelled his name differently than my brother Terry, and that we were both doing the bus job not as a career but to make some money. I came away from that first meeting feeling like I may have met a kindred spirit. Sometimes, when you meet someone for the first time, you make an instant connection. Ours was to last for the next 41 years.

A few days after our first meeting I was able to find an entry of note in my journal on July 23rd from which I will now paraphrase: “Driver Terry Carlin saw my Mother Jones magazine and he said that he is a subscriber, that he listens to National Public Radio and the ‘Prairie Home Companion’ show, that I like him more and more, and that we could maybe become good friends.” In some ways I felt like I was looking at a mirror image of myself.

I told him that not only was I (and still am) a subscriber to Mother Jones, but that I also was doing some interning work there, volunteering my time to help with various jobs like filing, answering letters, and occasionally filling in for the receptionist. Being a big fan of the progressive magazine, he expressed interest in maybe volunteering as well, so I asked my contact there if she would be interested in having another person helping out, and she said, “Sure.” And this was how Terrie came to start working at the magazine, and how he got to meet Elena Vasquez, who is here today, and who – along with Terrie’s sister Erin – was with him four decades later, in his final hours.

Terrie and I began socializing some, going to see films or having an occasional beer. As luck would have it, both of us in the summer of 1984 were in relationships that were coming to an end, and we each needed a new place to live. We decided to pool our resources and rent a place together, so in September of that year we rented a house in the Marin County town of San Anselmo. It was a really nice pad, but part of the deal before moving in was committing to maintaining the huge garden that the previous longtime residents had created. We signed off on the deal, only to find that neither of us had the time nor interest in spending countless hours cultivating sunflowers and other exotic flora, so a year later we found another house in Sausalito, which is just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and it had no garden, so we moved into it in September of 1985. We were much happier there, as the climate was cooler, the house was two blocks from the bay, and we could be in the city in just a short amount of time.

Of all the male roommates that I ever had, going all the way back to my family formative and college days, Terrie by far was the most simpatico one ever. We had the same vegetarian eating habits, same political views, he was extremely neat and courteous, and neither of us watched TV, so we never had one in the house. We were even about the same size physically, so when I had clothes that I no longer wanted I would let him take his pick before I donated to the Good Will. And he was quiet as a mouse. Except, of course, for when he played his flute. While it is easy to muffle the sound of me playing acoustic guitar, there is no way to muzzle the sound of a flute. On the plus side, it wasn’t so bad because he was a decent player, and he tried to practice when I was not at home.

In the 41 years that we knew each other, I cannot recall ever having an argument or major disagreement about anything, which is pretty darn rare. He was so even-tempered that any disputes that we may have had were minor and easily resolved. Heck, I have argued with my real brothers countless times over the decades. But not with Terrie.

While we did have so much in common, there was just one area where we agreed to disagree – musical taste. Terrie was into the jazz sounds of guys like Pat Metheny and Steely Dan, while as a performer I was more into bluegrass and country music. We each tolerated the other’s taste, but we didn’t bother the other by blasting our favorites on the house sound system. However, I will say that Terrie came to see me play live shows countless times over the years, which I always appreciated. And, on one of our bus trips to the mountains he played flute while I strummed guitar and sang “Danny Boy” during one of the seniors’ talent shows, and it was a big hit.

However, there is one recording that we did agree on, and it’s one that has been part of my holiday tradition for almost the past four decades. To those of you that know of my history with the “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” song, no, it’s not that one. I am talking about Irish flutist James Galway’s Christmas Carol that he recorded in 1986. Terrie made a cassette of this for me back then, and I listen to it every Christmas morning. It will forevermore have extra special meaning to me.

Oh, there was one food item that we could not agree on at all. One of the foulest tasting things that I have ever come across is called Vegemite, which is a “thick, dark brown Australian food spread made from leftover brewers' yeast extract with various vegetable and spice additives.” If you’ve never heard of or tasted it, consider yourself lucky!

With the same last names along with the unusual spelling of his first name, one of the funny byproducts of us sharing a house together was that computers decided that we must be a married couple, so in order to save money on postage we began getting political mail addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Carlin”! And, if you were to do a search today for Terrie on the truepeoplesearch.com website, on the very first page, under his name, it says – and I kid you not – “Related to Laurence J. Carlin.”

Many years later, when Terrie told me that he was going to change the spelling of his name, my first thought was, “Wow, after all of these years he’s finally going to use T-e-r-r-y in order to stop people from thinking he was a female!” Imagine my surprise when he told me that, “Uh, no. I am going to change the spelling of my last name to the original Irish!” Which, of course, is Carolan. And all seven letters in the name appear in the word “California.”

If my memory serves me well, Terrie moved out of the Sausalito house in January of 1977 in order to go back to school at Cal State Humboldt in the town of Arcata up on the northern coast of the state. But he came down in the summer of that year to do some more parttime bus work, and in June – now with a different tour bus company – we were asked to drive a group of seniors up to Camp Mather, the city-owned camp near Yosemite Park for five days. None of the fulltime drivers wanted to go on the trip because it involved staying in a cabin in the woods without access to a television. We went and had such a wonderful time that we did the trip again at the end of August. I believe that this was the end of Terrie’s bus driving days though, as he went back to school and never did the job again. I, however, loved the camp and park so much that I continued going on those trips for the next 15 years. Ironically, I am now at the age where if I wanted to go to camp again, I’d have to ride on, and not drive, the bus!

While Terrie and I never lived together again, we stayed in touch over the next three decades, whether he was in Arcata, Chile, China, Spain, San Francisco, or in the town of Richmond, which is only about 25 minutes from where I now live in Mill Valley. Many years back we began a birthday tradition of taking each other out for lunch on our respective days, which are two months apart. I began working in downtown San Francisco in 1994, and he didn’t own a car for the past 15 years or so, so the usual routine was for him to ride the BART train into the city where we would meet up and catch up on the latest news. The last time we got to celebrate was when I turned 70 this past February. We had a nice repast at an outdoor café in the town of San Rafael.

But at the end of our meal, before we were about to go our separate ways, he said, “I have something that I need to talk with you about.” By the tone of his voice I knew that some serious had happened, and he explained how he’d been experiencing a shortness of breath while swimming, so he went to a doctor and discovered to his – and my shock and trepidation – that he’d been diagnosed with mesothelioma, that he was going in for major surgery in March, and that even though it was going to be a tough recovery, he was optimistic about getting through the process. I was stunned beyond belief because I knew that this disease was severe and that it could affect someone’s longevity. Terrie was one of the healthiest people that I have ever known, so this made no sense whatsoever. I gave him a hug, told him to let me know whatever I could do to help, and to keep me up to date. I then drove home in a daze, angry and saddened about what I had just heard from my dear friend.

We corresponded quite a bit via texting over the next few months, and my wife Claudia and I went to visit him in the hospital on March 22nd, just a few days before he went home to rehabilitate. Even though he’d been through hell and back, he was in good spirits and was looking forward to getting through chemo and to some sort of normal life again. During the first two months of April I had back-to-back bouts of Covid, so there was no way that I was going to see him for a while since he was immunocompromised. I wasn’t able to visit him at home until May 4th when I went over to the house, and we chatted for three hours. While he was weak and a bit gaunt, he seemed like he was coming along slowly. On Tuesday, June 10th, I picked up Terrie at the house and we had genuinely nice breakfast at a restaurant nearby. He seemed much improved in the five weeks that had passed, he was looking forward to his final chemo treatment, and I told him that I would come back again soon to visit some more. Sadly, that was the last time that I saw him.

On August 18th, my late father’s birthday, I offered to stop by and visit while dropping of some cherry tomatoes from our garden. I knew that he loved them. He said that “I probably won’t eat them – too much acid – but Elena and (her mother) Annie will certainly enjoy them. Sorry I can’t manage a visit, feeling tired and weak today.”

On September 18th I received a text from Terrie that said, “Update. Infusion #1 did not happen today. Nurses could not get a good IV despite repeated attempts. May schedule having a PICC line put in. Disappointed.” And this was the last time I heard from him.

Three days later, on the 21st – my late mother’s birthday – I finally had a free Saturday off from playing music, and I was about to text Terrie to see if he would be up for a visit when I received a crushing text from Elena that said, “I am very sorry to write this. Terrie passed away today at 2 p.m. Erin, his sister, and I were with him. Can’t talk now. Maybe in a few days.” And as everyone here knows, the world has not been the same since.

I was in complete shock. I had no idea how dire his condition was, and while I knew from his recent text that things were tough, I certainly didn’t expect him to pass way three days later. And to this day, I still find it hard to believe that my longtime friend is gone forever.

But his spirit will be with us eternally. Terrie was one of those special people that you only meet a few times in your life. I thought he would outlive us all. Two years back, when Claudia and I were updating our living trust, I asked him if he would be our successor trustee in case something was to happen to the two of us. After 27 years of courting, Claudia and I got married during Covid, but we did not have a celebration in CA due to the pandemic. But if we had had a celebration and ceremony, I would have asked Terrie to be my best man, as he was certainly the best of friends.

With profound sadness and gratitude, I want to thank Elena and the Carlin family for inviting and allowing me to speak today. While it has been a pleasure reconnecting and meeting all of you, I wish it had been under other circumstances. Judging by how many people are here, it’s obvious that my non-brother-from-another-mother, Terrie, touched you all in many ways, as he did me.

In closing, a few quotes. As the Irish like to say,

“The grief of our loss may be with us for a long time

But the joy of our memories will stay forever.”

To paraphrase the late singer/songwriter Randy Van Warmer, Terrie will always be in our hearts, and often on our minds.

And finally, these few exceptional lines from the Karla Bonoff song titled Goodbye My Friend:

 Goodbye my friend

I know I’ll never see you again

But the time together through all the years

Will take away these tears

It’s okay now

Goodbye my friend