It must be said to begin with, that Jeff Weiss was an unrepentant troll. He was a loving father, pain-in-the-ass husband, a curmudgeon of the highest order, and the kind of guy whose response to a midnight call to help hide a body would have been “Do I need to bring a shovel?”
He was my friend of 32 years.
We met as undergrads at the University of Maryland, College Park. As all good Jewish kids do, we met at the Hillel Student Center. We even dated for about…three months? Something like that. After we broke up, we spent nearly as much time together as we had before, because we both hung out at Hillel and worked for the Jewish paper on campus. He was known for wearing a fedora and suit as often as he could get away with it.
Jeff wasn’t just there when I met my husband of 25 years, he was with us on our first date. (Long story. Don’t ask.) Jeff’s wife Rachel lived across the hall from me in the dorm and I’m pretty sure I introduced them to begin with.
Jeff was never someone who cared about the whole world, much of which he was perfectly willing to watch fall into a live volcano (or push, as the case may be). But the people, places, and things he cared about, he cared about a lot, even if he hid it under a solid veneer of indifference.
He loved to wind me up about something I cared about (say, recycling or racism) just to piss me off and watch me rant. But when I needed a ride home from surgery, he sat in a boring waiting room for hours and got me home in one piece.
Jeff was constitutionally incapable of remembering to charge his cell phone or keep it on his person, and there was nothing he loved more than getting in his car and randomly driving to, say, Calvert Cliffs to look for shark’s teeth. I can’t begin to count the number of times a phone call with Rachel started with “I don’t know where Jeff is.” And we would curse his name and gnash our teeth and he would show up eventually…usually with a trunk full of food from somewhere.
He loved Hawaiian shirts…hell, he loved everything about Hawaii and every year for Rachel’s birthday, he would buy a fresh lei and have it shipped all the way across the country for her.
He loved Rachel (even if he was a goddamned pain in the ass) and he absolutely positively adored his daughter Ariella. He was proud of her snark and her brains and her ability to insult you in at least ten different languages. (He had an app on his phone. Seriously.) He was so proud of her at her bat mitzvah he almost forgot his air of indifference. It was adorable.
His cubicle at work was plastered with pictures of Ariella. There was also a cannonball and a rotary phone, if I remember correctly, which should give you a fairly accurate view of his personality.
There was a time when we didn’t think Jeff would survive until Ariella’s bat mitzvah, so we should be counting our blessings that he made it two years past that time. But it’s hard to count blessings when the world is just a bit less eccentric and more boring today.
The process of setting up his funeral has been a trainwreck of ridiculousness, including a lot of non-working phones and miscommunication, which Jeff would have greatly appreciated. He would be leaning back in a chair and laughing his ass off at us right now. Not helping in any way, mind you, but definitely laughing.
Jeff, we’re gonna miss your snark and your need to make pots of chicken soup that could feed an army. Also, the rum balls, Those were really good.
We promise to find more good insults to teach your daughter and tell her all the worst stories about you. We promise to take care of your wife as best we can. And we promise to never forget the time you “edited” my archaeology notes to describe the rat civilization that lived at Maynard-Burgess House.
May your memory be a blessing to all who knew you, ya bastard.