Dave Murray: More than 40 years after his first day at the Ra-Lin discount store, he still likes going to work. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

These golden days of September, these magnificent afternoons of late summer sun and deep shadows across the Onondaga Valley, seem about as beautiful as it can ever be, even if renewed routines of school and work make such a moment easy to overlook.

Dave Murray has an appreciation that, well, might help with our appreciation. He wakes up every morning and marvels at all of it, often before he goes to sell televisions and stereos at the legendary Ra-Lin discount store on Burnet Avenue — a business that to many of us represents one unique, bedrock piece of Syracuse.

Murray has a simple reason for his gratitude. For much of his life, he said, “I didn’t plan for the future because I didn’t think I had one.” In his 20s and 30s he was a late-night guy, drinking and partying as hard as he could because he figured he had absolutely nothing to lose.

Now?

“I look forward to breakfast,” Murray said. He especially savors the aroma and taste of the day’s first cup of coffee. He turned 70 in July, which is a milestone for anyone, but it’s a threshold that Murray is still treasuring in a way that’s really the whole point of this column.

Dave Murray, in recovery from a double lung transplant at the Cleveland Clinic, with longtime friend Steve Piesciuk. Credit: Courtesy Dave Murray

He remembers being a teenager, and saying “with all the sureness a 19-year-old could muster: I’ll be dead at 30.” He was born with cystic fibrosis, a rare and chronic disease that caused a thick and suffocating mucus to build up in his lungs and pancreas. His parents were told not to expect that he’d live much past 5.

Here he is. August was exactly 22 years since — with his health disintegrating — he survived a double lung transplant at the Cleveland Clinic. He remembers how he awoke from surgery to realize he was intubated, a terrifying sensation. He remembers how the doctors said there was a chance his body would reject the new lungs, and how the average length of survival for the procedure at that time was somewhere around five years.

“A lot has to go right for it to go much longer,” Murray said.

For Murray, until this day, a lot’s gone right. He never forgets the sensation — as they weaned him off the machine — of drawing real breaths again on his own, or the growing revelation in those early weeks that swept away a shadow he had felt since childhood:

“I’m going to live.”

Late summer mornings, 22 years later? Yes. They still look sweet.

That gratitude was not engrained at birth. It was learned, a lifetime process that’s continuing. Nothing about Murray’s childhood was easy. His parents divorced when he was young. His dad carried the emotional scars from a harsh childhood at the House of Providence orphanage. His mom spent her life struggling with mental illness.

Wounded by life, they did their best, Murray said. I interviewed him recently on a bench at Elmwood Park, a place he chose because of fond memories of living nearby with sisters Kathy and Judy, briefly, when they were kids. His mother, he said, was always packing up and moving. She tried to find spots with proximity to schools, because she never drove.

Dave Murray: He is almost as much of a civic landmark as Ra-Lin’s, the legendary store where he works. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

They’d rent a place. She couldn’t pay the rent. They’d get evicted.

He figures, all told, they moved more than a dozen times — including an eviction on the day he graduated from Liverpool High School. Humor became his best survival tool, his means for continually reshaping and rebuilding his own story, which for a “new kid” is coping strategy in each new classroom.

At 14, during a brief stint at Jamesville-DeWitt, Murray met a guy in homeroom named Steve Piesciuk, who helped Murray figure out how to open his school locker.

A year or two later, Murray moved. Piesciuk — unlike so many childhood friends Murray had to leave behind — had a car that allowed the two teens to keep hanging around. To this day, they remain close friends, playing online chess throughout the week between Syracuse and Ohio, where Piesciuk eventually retired.

“He’s certainly a guy you could always count on,” said Piesciuk, who hosts Murray every year when his buddy makes a mandatory return visit for an annual checkup at the Cleveland Clinic.

The young Dave Murray: His family moved at least a dozen times when he was a child. Credit: Courtesy Dave Murray

As for Ra-Lin’s, Murray has greeted customers on the floor for more than 40 years. “There aren’t many stores like it left in the country,” he said. He first learned to interact with the public when he was hired to handle the counter at the old Morris Electronics on West Fayette Street, in the structure that now hosts the new Public Safety Building.

He wasn’t long out of high school. That job helped change his life. His first two bosses were “Mike and Ronnie,” he said — with Ronnie being Ron Wray, the great Syracuse music historian. Murray, for his part, was “an angry young man,” convinced his life would be brief and thus not always worried about what might be seen as good decisions.

His bosses were patient. He settled in. He loved music and became a familiar regular at local concerts, “a strong-willed and tenacious survivor,” as described by longtime rock disc jockey Dave Frisina. Murray also discovered a passion for writing: For years, he contributed a humor column and music features to the old Syracuse New Times, a long-running alternative newspaper.

Dave Murray during an interview at Elmwood Park, Syracuse. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

Murray “is one of my favorite people,” said Mike Greenstein, who served for many years as The New Times editor-in-chief. Greenstein said that isn’t simply because Murray had “a burning desire to write, and The New Times provided the opportunity,” but because of Murray’s “attitude, his willingness to learn, and his wealth of knowledge on so many things.”

For instance: In the 1990s, Murray wrote a how-to-use-it book about VCRs. Somehow or other, it found its way to famed humor columnist Erma Bombeck, who was impressed enough to send Murray an appreciative note.

Two years ago, Murray released a novel, “A Breath of Fresh Air” — in reality, a thinly disguised autobiography — that tells the tale of a 48-year-old man, waiting desperately for a double lung transplant.

Dave Murray carries a newly purchsed stereo receiver to the car for Randy Mascari, a customer at Ra-Lin. Mike Greenlar | Central Current.

Here is the major difference: In real life, Murray was 47.

His central message, always, is demonstrating the live-or-die difference made by organ donors. He never learned the identity of the person whose lungs he received — the family didn’t choose to establish contact — but Murray puts it bluntly:

He’s around because of that decision. Before that surgery, he had descended into a heaviness, a fatigue, that felt impossible to reverse — “like a tire that’s ready to blow, and you’re going 70 mph.” The transplant changed everything. A guy who spent each day half-expecting to die realized how much he wanted to live. He made a conscious decision to “steer away from the bitterness,” as he says now.

“Part of it is just getting older,” he said. “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” He’s also intensely conscious of a world in which “the internet has coarsened the conversation.” Too many people embrace the casual license to be anonymously cruel. He fears the cost of digital isolation, of lives lived behind a screen.

Dave Murray: A chance meeting with baseball legend Yogi Berra, at a picnic at a downstate school attended by his nephew. Credit: Courtesy Dave Murray

His best remedy, every day, is community. “I love the people I work with,” Murray said. With his customers, he tries to really hear what they say. If there’s one truth he brought back from going so close to the brink, it’s that true empathy — delivered or received — can transform the whole landscape around you.

Twenty-two years beyond the transplant, he takes medicine to address this rule of biology: Your body will never stop trying to reject transplanted organs. He became a diabetic after the operation. As for his immune system, he compares it to “walking across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope.”

To this moment, he remains thankful he never contracted Covid-19. He lives, always, at elevated risk.

Still: “Lives” is the operative word, and Murray is grateful. He often visits his older sister Kathy, now enduring her own battles with her health: “My protector,” Murray said, recalling her fierce allegiance during childhood. He thinks with appreciation of “an old guy” — long dead — known as “Big Bob,” who taught the teenage Murray to drive when there was no one else to do it.

Dave Murray with some of the tv’s he sells at Ra Lin Discount at 625 Burnet Ave. Syracuse. Mike Greenlar | Central Current.

Murray has a story about the late Yogi Berra he especially loves. Years ago, Murray’s nephew was going to a downstate school also attended by one of Berra’s grandsons. The Yankee catching great showed up at a family picnic at the school. When it ended, he and Murray carried their chairs to their cars at the same time, and Berra took a minute at the car radio to check on the Yankees score.

“We’re winning,” he said, glancing at Murray, two words of assumed fraternity that for an instant brought them together as part of the same team.

Murray never married, though a few times he came close. His early morning philosophy is simply this: “Something great might happen today.” That might be a song he hasn’t heard in forever showing up out of nowhere on the radio. It could be stumbling upon a movie he reveres, while flipping channels. Maybe someone he hasn’t seen in years walks into Ra-Lin’s, a presence that amplifies the power of the day.

“I still like going to work,” Murray said, which he finds is one of the most precious gifts of all. He said selling televisions and stereos is a primer for life, because you need to shut up and really listen to what the customer wants, and the amazing thing is — when you do it — how people don’t forget your name.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...