Vinnie K.

He was a very quiet man.  His mildness fooled the impatient and less than observant into not noticing him or at least into discounting his significance in even a small gathering. He looked, listened and seemed to pass no judgment.  Either greeting you or bidding farewell, he shook your hand firmly and wished you and yours well and wasted no energy on charm, flattery or niceties that distracted from a certain unvarnished truthfulness that somehow did not hurt.

Beginning with, during and after a major illness, Vinnie sent me get well cards. His handwriting was atrocious, but the thoughts, expressed through these deeds, now made the aphorism incontrovertible: that these (thoughts, i.e. actions) indeed are what count. Came a birthday or a relapse, and Mr. K. remembered and sometimes included a baseball card or some other small two dimensional memento of sports or of the war years…always a small but powerful token of his caring. He was not my friend, but my father's.  So often did I directly benefit from the love that reflected back on Dad (and then on me).  Once my abominable behavior while a car service driver, directed toward a less than angelic customer, was brought to the attention of the lessors of my vehicle.  Technically not my employers, these "bosses" nonetheless, held the power to deny me a leased automobile based on the apparently reported complaint. As luck would have it, one dispatcher on duty at the time was an old friend of Dad. Yes, he intervened with the powers that were, and my stream of income was uninterrupted thanks to him and especially thanks to Dad's more than cordial relationship with him as well as with nearly everyone he met.

Vinnie died more than fourteen years ago. I remember being surprised and frankly annoyed that his wake was arranged far from his friends and neighbors in our shared hometown. Some of his children had long since moved away to New Jersey and the services were held there. The last evening of the wake found me about seventy miles away with barely enough time to arrive before the final hour. In the gathering dusk with imperfect directions, I raced to pay my final respects. Several wrong turns and other impediments resulted in an arrival several minutes after the chapel's visiting hours had officially ended. The empty room, except for myself and Vinnie's body surrounded by gently glowing lights and candles gave me some comfort. Perhaps I had secretly wanted to be alone with him and this was an unconsciously achieved "success" to be able to say goodbye to him without the formalities and obstacles to genuine grieving that a room full of strangers would have meant (I never knew his family).  The funeral directors inevitably strolled into the room to gently abort my visit and then one of his son's appeared.  He introduced himself thusly and I identified myself, but did not attempt to explain who his father was, rather, what he meant to me.  The imagined beauty of joining hearts with such candid stories seem to always fall flat in my experience. For Mr. K., Jr., I was but a late visitor who regardless of who I was, was now an inconvenience and not a part of his memories.  That was okay.  I had my moment with Vinnie and I thanked him, perhaps too late, but perhaps he heard me.