OCTOBER 10, 2019 – My wife said I was his best friend. That statement is sad to the extent it was true. I wasn’t much of a friend.
In earlier years, I’d had little interaction with our neighbor directly across the alley. His father, the retired owner of a machine shop, had been the dominant figure of the household. Well into his eighties the dad rode around the neighborhood on his old, motorcycle, equipped with side-car and a bright orange flag atop a tall springy rod. He liked to putz with small engines and other mechanical stuff out in his garage. An outgoing sort, the dad was highly opinionated too—the kind of character whose energetic biases zapped the strength right out of your own.
Late every Saturday afternoon, in his old, big, blue Cadillac, the old man took his wife to their nearby Catholic church. He’d back the ocean-going vehicle ever so slowly out of his crowded garage, into the alley, and . . . bump! . . . into the chain-link fence on our side of the alley. Eventually I got with the program and removed our battered fence.
During all those years, the old couple’s son, Herb, Jr., lived under their roof, and though my age and apparently able-bodied, he never appeared to work. Occasionally he’d drive off for awhile in his truck, which most of the time was parked to the side of their garage and marked by a bright orange cone. Our only encounters occurred when he expressed mean-spirited displeasure over the commotion emanating from our backyard—our two young boys rollerblading or playing basketball in the driveway.
After the parents died—well into their nineties—Herb, Jr. became plain, “Herb,” lord of the manor . . . and wholly estranged from his two sisters, who never again visited their childhood home. We heard harsh words from both sides of the coin.
Over the ensuing years, Herb turned into a human sound and light sensor. Invariably, within seconds after my wife or I stepped outside our back doorway or so much as sneezed on our back porch, Herb would prowl around his backyard or on the apron behind his garage. His prowls did not project a friendly vibe.
Then came the day when Herb surprised me with actual words spoken from the edge of his yard. I was tossing a bag into our alley-side garbage bin. “Say,” he said, “I noticed you left your garage lights on last night. That costs money.”
I grunted acknowledgment and tagged on a low toned “thanks.”
Over time that ice-breaker developed into a kind of rapport between Herb and me, even between Herb and my wife, who, I might say, became his second best friend. But their conversations, if you could call them that, were not much beyond the exchanges that we’ve since learned Herb had managed with his other immediate neighbors. He was by any definition, a loner. And he didn’t own a mobile phone or a computer, though he divulged that he went online at the local library.
Stay tuned for a turn in “Eulogy.”
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
