Admiral Jack Christiansen

My appreciation of Jack Christiansen started with the news that he was a Navy admiral and a world-class character who drank "pink shit and rum."

This was reported to me by my wife, Karen, who was best friends with Tina Christiansen, the Admiral's daughter. Karen told good stories about parties on the Admiral's boat, the "Navy Cross." Karen said also that the Admiral loved women, and loved to flirt with them, including her. This gave me another good bearing on the man. I felt that, when and if we met, I wanted him to like me, as the man who married one of his favorite girls.

We did meet, but only briefly at first: one quick introduction at Tina's house a couple of years ago, led to a dinner at Tina’s house with her father, then a dinner in our home, and then a couple of months ago again at our house. This last event had a special purpose. The Admiral was dying, and Tina asked Karen (photographer extraordinaire) to take photos of her, her brother Tom, and their father, together. Today, one of those photos sits framed on a sideboard off our kitchen. It is the Admiral in profile, seated in an ordinary blue leather chair. Except he sat it in such a posture that it became a captain's chair, on the bridge of a ship, right there in our living room. I would like to know how he did that.

Tina loved her father fiercely. She fondly called him "Sir," and she loved to tell the stories, or get him to. They were stories great in their mix of respect, duty, irreverence and love that was characteristic of a Navy admiral and world-class character. He flew fighter jets and commanded aircraft carriers, but from a signature altitude. The man Tina described had a sure sense of command, and a low threshold of pleasure. She holds two memories equally vivid. She remembers dancing with her father in an officer's club ballroom when she was 12. And she remembers her father teaching her to read the ocean, and how sailors can see over the horizon, see things that others can't see. They scan it like a gunner. Look. Stop. Look. Stop. Look. Stop.

The "Navy Cross" is a 51-foot vessel in which the Admiral, after his retirement in 1975, traversed the Pacific, when it suited him, between San Diego, where Tina and Tom live, and his home, with their stepmother Clare, in Whidbey Island, Washington. Tina would call Karen and say, "Dad’s here!" If Karen and Tina’s other friends had enough “boat credit,” aka an appropriate supply of pink shit and rum, the Admiral gave them the run of the vessel. I suspect Karen and others got a boat ride with or without boat credit. Pink shit, beyond the horizon, is grapefruit juice. But it would be inaccurate to say the Admiral drank grapefruit juice and rum, and I only mention it to point that out.

The Admiral had to give up the Navy Cross a couple of years ago, due to failing health, a signal to all that the party was winding down. Adm. Christiansen died April 30, at 84. Maybe 200 people attended his services May 14 at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, on Point Loma in San Diego, and a pair of Navy jets roared over in tribute, in missing man formation. In their wake, an old Navy pilot near me said, "I love that sound."

Adm. Christiansen assumed command of his own memorial reception, ordering an open bar. "He wanted to buy everybody a drink at his funeral," Tina said. I wanted to toast him with a pink shit and rum, but I can't drink pink shit. On the bottle of a cholesterol medication I take, it says, "No pink shit." So I asked the bartender for white rum and grenadine, which is pink. "No grenadine," she said. She did have bitters, so I took a rum and bitters out to a life-sized six foot photo of the Admiral in a flight suit, walking a flight line. The photo was taken from ground level, which seemed to me the only way to get Adm. Christiansen in appropriate perspective.

We get a fix on all our relationships by a process of triangulation. I barely knew this man to whom I was lifting a rum and faux pink shit, but I had acquired enough readings to understand that I wanted him to like me. I thought if he liked me, maybe he would decide to rub some of himself off on me, or open some kind of door for me, showing me something he knew about life that I didn't. I still feel that, and in doing so, I keep him alive. I'm not the only one. Many people this week are having trouble getting it to register, that Jack Christiansen is "gone." There is a rip in our days, where his life passed.