Carl is my teacher. I say is because even in his death he keeps teaching me, and because his old lessons keep applying. He taught me what it means to push yourself, in everything you do. Carl paid the steepest price for his intensity. OK, I've had to learn that from him, too: that there's such a thing as too much, too far, too hard.
First by the physical challenge of Ultimate Frisbee, and later through the movies, Carl taught me about pushing myself. Carl didn't just like movies, he logged them. Every time he saw one, he entered into a journal its title, the name of the theater where he saw it, his rating, and the ticket price. He did this for at least twenty years. Only Carl Dolan would measure his enjoyment of a movie by how much it cost him; that was how seriously he took his pleasure, because for Carl all pleasure exacted a price. Who knows why he loved cinema? Maybe because it tells so many bright stories of redemption and reconciliation, two things Carl sought so ardently, for so long.
But I think he loved movies best when they were funny. Because the thing about Carl was that he was a born comedian. He could make you lightheaded with laughter -- you laughed not just at what he said, but because you couldn't believe he said it. His deadpan, stiff-limbed wit nailed you so fast you were laughing before you even got the joke, and then when it really hit he'd shatter into laughter too, sharing it with you. The Double Dinner Plate Schism depicts his comedic style. Carl was over at our house and we had just set the table for supper. In those days, that was often a dish I like to call Suburban Stir Fry: old broccoli and red cabbage, and perhaps some wrinkled mushrooms, unforgivingly sautéed in garlic, doused in soy sauce, then topped with melted jack cheese. Carl was clowning around with a butter knife, a typically Dolanesque occupation of down time that combined equal parts muppet rambunction, improvisatory sketch comedy, and the terrorizing of young children. Mocking a hunger that was probably very real, Carl rhythmically banged the butter knife on the table a few times. He punctutated this Little Rascal impersonation by stabbing the knife right onto his plate -- which broke neatly into two pieces. Carl froze with sudden and mute embarrassment, but we all laughed, and once Mom convinced him that the plate was cheap and no kind of heirloom, Carl got hysterical with mirth too. But here is why the event is titled the Double Dinner Plate Schism, and how it bound him to my family forever: A couple of years later, Carl was over for dinner again. We set the table with the very same dishes, which prompted us to reminisce about the Time Carl Broke The Plate. Carefully reconstructing the incident, Carl picked up his butter knife and, as in a slo-mo instant replay, brought its point down illustratively upon his plate -- which broke in half. And again shock gave way to laughter. The comedy of Carl was in that chance slapstick, his accidental genius for jokes that required his presence as the kicker and the butt. And the complexity of Carl included both the audacious nutball and the fierce searcher, the David Lynch fanatic and the Christian scholar, the committed paterfamilias and the lonely cyclist. Just looking at him, you saw his contradiction: a red afro over a freckled face and cartoonishly bulging blue eyes; but the pared, hard, angular body of an obsessive athlete. He was longwaisted, austere, awkward. But he could balance a broom on each index finger -- and his bike on his chin -- at the same time.
