Community gathers to celebrate the life of Pat Dietz
Editor’s note: Pat Dietz, the iconic co-founder of Dietz Brothers Music in Manhattan Beach, passed away June 28 after being injured while saving his grandson from an out-of-control car in Torrance two days earlier. Due to the nature of his death, the family had to delay his burial and memorial until a cause of death was officially determined by authorities. Dietz, 68, was laid to rest in a private ceremony in July. He will be celebrated at a community memorial at the Kiwanis Club and Valley Park in Hermosa Beach on Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. Following is the eulogy delivered at his funeral by his daughter, Kelly Dietz Johnson.
To begin, an excerpt from “Hannah Coulter,” a novel by Pat’s favorite writer, Wendell Berry: “I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a child I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.”
My dad loved to tell the same jokes over and over, and had a pact with his best friends that they were allowed to tell each other’s best stories as autobiographical. He loved people who could tell a good story, and people who would listen to his. He loved to stop by for a visit, he loved to eat chocolate chips together late at night in the kitchen while we took turns cracking each other up, and he’d cry with you in a parked car somewhere when life was hard. When he laughed, you could see all the way back to his molars.
He held all babies with their stomach against the inside of his forearm and their head in the crook of his elbow. He loved teenagers, and considered himself still 19 at heart. Somehow, he also made being a real adult look interesting, and possible.
He shuffled his feet when he walked, and had his same huge Birkenstocks resoled and re-corked every year. He loved P.G. Wodehouse’s novels and William Stafford’s poetry. He drank coffee any hour of the day or night, and he never passed anyone down on their luck without slipping them some cash.
When a hummingbird stunned itself on his window, he rescued it from the neighborhood cats and stayed up with it all night, feeding it sugar water and playing it Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. It was strong enough to be released by the next morning, but it visited him in his backyard for months. He followed the adventures of the Santa Monica mountain lion P-22 for years, and cried, hard, when it died last summer.
He loved Lucinda Williams and Bob Dylan. He sang his kids and grandkids Sweet Baby James and Prairie Lullaby and Jambalaya. After we blew out our birthday candles, he’d improvise a dozen versions of Happy Birthday in different styles — baroque, atonal, ragtime — until we were all laughing and it seemed like music could have been invented again just from that one melody. He loved figuring out which songs would get people up dancing the fastest at a party, and he loved teaching guitar lessons. He played so many gigs around Southern California over the years that he joked he’d been on a lifelong world tour of Los Angeles. If he said another musician was “a very fine player,” you knew they were someone special. After the last concert we went to together, he found the guitarist to tell her she should check out McCabe’s Music for an LA gig, and told her that he had taught Hazel [his granddaughter] how to play the song Lowrider the day before.
He was a devoted son and caregiver to his parents. He loved his mother, her fortitude and grace.
He worked hard to take care of us four kids, and was a patient and joyful father. I was always proud to be his daughter. He sent us late-night emails with songs and poems he thought we’d like, he helped Erik fix the farm’s irrigation system in 117-degree heat, he floated down the Big Sur River with us on inner tubes in the summer. He encouraged us, without end. He loved pulling extra chairs around the table for Sunday dinner for our friends and laughing together about Daylight Savings Time and a thousand other inside jokes. He was always, forever, on our side. He raised us to be hopeful, to be funny, to love eccentrics, and to be on the lookout for beauty.
He loved each of his six grandchildren with all his heart: Charlie, Hazel, Josiah, Willa, Matty, and Francis Patrick. He was generous, tender, and brave.
He loved Carol, my mom. They married at 19 and 21, a few months after they met at the University of Oregon, and they took care of each other their entire lives. Their home, and the love in it, was a sanctuary for anyone who needed one. Through illness and loss, joy and dailiness, they each held the other, always, at the very center of their own life. Their devotion to each other, to the life they made together, never wavered. If you knew them, you know that true love is real.
There would never have been enough time with him. We’ll bear the grief of losing him, forever. We’ll be carried by the love, forever.
The community memorial for Pat Dietz takes place on Saturday, August 26 from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Kiwanis Club and Valley Park, 2515 Valley Dr., Hermosa Beach.