A special neighbor

When you are in your early years of growing up, the people in your neighborhood become the subject of your interest and imagination. At the age of seven or eight, you know very little about anything, and so you are starving for information on any subject to fill up all the empty space inside your head. School should have provided some of that information, but let’s be honest, how exciting is school information at that age? My Aunt Helen and my older brother convincingly and continually told me I was adopted, so it was natural that I made up some sort of identity to give me a little more stature and confidence. One of the more fascinating figures in my neighborhood was a retired military man who lived across the street. I think what first caught my attention was his exotic hat. Actually, it was a helmet, a pith helmet. If you have ever seen a 1950s movie set in India or Africa, it was very likely that one of the male characters wore a pith helmet. Bwana John (of channel 6 Augusta fame) was always wearing a pith helmet when he introduced all the wonderful Tarzan movies on Saturday morning T.V., but I digress. I never saw my neighbor in any attire other than khakis that always appeared to be starched. I figured he still felt like he was in the military, and of course, the pith helmet was always perched on his head. To an impressionable seven-and-a-half-year-old, he cast a great shadow, so I felt like he was at least a general. If you rode down my street anytime from sunup to twilight, you could count on seeing the general. Unless the weather was violently threatening, he would be out in the yard trimming some shrub or picking up magnolia leaves. He was a wiry fellow and intently serious about whatever task he assigned to himself. You would never see him at rest or moving around without purpose. In the summer months with all the heat and humidity, he was still crisp in his khakis and unaffected by the gnats, mosquitos or ants. I had no interest or ability in determining his age, but when I was in junior high school, the general began building a brick wall around his entire yard. It was just a low wall, but he intended to build it all the way around the rather large yard. I remember the meticulous way he conducted that very challenging job of brick laying. There was no uncertainty about him finishing the job if he lived long enough. Year after year, I would always know that he was there. Maybe if he was behind the garage working on the lawn mower or under the porch fixing a rotten board, you might not see him right away, but I knew he was still there. It was somehow a thing of comfort to know that, even though I never spoke a word to him or him to me. That really didn’t matter. Just watching him all those years established a sense of order and respect that kind of settled all over the whole neighborhood. He had a wife who was very kind to us, and he and my father would exchange comments about plants in the yard and tools they borrowed from each other. One day while I was away at school, someone ran off the road and damaged the brick wall. That seemed to change everything. I remember seeing him looking at the broken brick scattered on the sidewalk. I was certain he would fix it, but it took him a very long time to get things back into place. After he died, his wife gave my father some of the general’s old hand tools, and when my father died, I brought them home, and I still use them every now and then just to stay in touch with a special neighbor and know he’s still there.