Another teacher gone

I'm thinking today—as I have been since last Friday, when they told me he had a massive stroke, with bleeding on the brain stem—of my old friend and neighbor Richard Williams.

There's probably no way Richard would have been my friend, had he not been my next door neighbor: one BIG reason to be grateful for the motley assortment of recent immigrants, old and young hippies, striving single mothers and assorted weirdos who live on our block.

We are a true Cannery Row—sometimes violent, often rude, always struggling with the basic neighborhood niceties of garbage pick-up and alley plowing and keeping the noise down. A man was murdered on the street a block down this summer, gunned down in the street. Darin, the cop who lives three doors down, has repeatedly busted the young Asian hoodlums who run a chop shop in the vacant garage in the middle of the block. We've had pit bulls chase kids home from the bus stop. Once an arsonist tried to burn our garage down.

In the midst of all this Richard floated serene, with a kindly greeting for everyone, literally everyone who would look his way. This was a man who seemed made of love. He loved his son Bobby the cop, whose trained police dog Rico made the papers for chasing down some goon. He loved his gorgeous little granddaughters Tiedra and Tiara, who stopped by for breakfast with him every morning before heading for the bus. He loved their mom, who lives in an apartment complex just down the block, and he loved his two other daughters who lived far away—carefully re-hanging the fussy dried flower wreath that one of them insisted went so beautifully in his living room, right before she arrived for a visit.

But he also seemed to love the mailman, and the pants-sagging hoodlums who wander down the street, and the day care kids who would stream down the sidewalk past his gate as he hung over it and blessed them on their way with his greeting. I never heard him speak harshly about any of our neighbors, even the ones who deserved it, even the ones who obviously thought of him as just another old black guy—a former porter on the railroad, a pool shark, a poor man all his life.

As far as I know, Richard didn't vote, though he kept abreast of some current events. He didn't fret about about his undoubtedly tiny pension, about our troubled block, or anything in the temporal world. He believed in miracles and in the literal word of the Bible, dressing up several times a week for his visits to the Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall on Hague Avenue. Surely he was a respected elder there; many women from the Hall came by whenever he was ill to help cook, clean or manage the garden. But he never proselytized; at least not to us.

No, our interactions were that classic blend of practical information and teasing banter that is the best sort of communication between neighbors. We'd remind him of snow emergencies and he'd pick up our mail when we were out of town. We'd tease him about his hatred of the gorgeous old elm tree that loomed over his house for so many years; how he hated that "dirty tree" for its massive leaf drop and twig showers, and how he missed its shade when it finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease! We helped him lay new sod on his tiny front lawn, and marveled that he would pay Chemlawn to spray their poisons on it once a week. We smelled his peppery barbecue marinades and salivated at the roasted game hens he would sometimes bring over for us as a treat.

I went in his house only a half-dozen times, only for brief chats; we weren't close that way. In winter, weeks would go by when we didn't see him, and could only watch to make sure his sidewalk go shoveled by one of the legion of us who vied to do it first. But Richard and I talked over the fence nearly every day, summer after summer, and we shared the care of the flaming red maple sapling that he planted on the boulevard right between our two houses, after the elm came down.

And when we got back from Bolivia and I saw Richard outside, watering that little tree, I felt a such a rush of homecoming. I bounded out of the car and ran over to hug him. He said "Hey kid! Don't you ever go away like that again!" I know he is happy in his heaven, but how I wish I could say that to him right now.