I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have any friends. True, there are many acquaintances, lots of colleagues, classmates, neighbors, co-workers, primos and primas, but no friends.<\/p>\n
At least not anymore. The only person I believe was my Friend died last week.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to miss him. My sons called him Vince-Uncle, I suppose because our youngest son, Ben, mixed up the words, and that stuck. I liked our artificially appending \u00e2\u20ac\u0153uncle\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to our names; somehow that made me feel closer. We go back about 50 years, to when my wife and I joined the faculty at Cuba (N.M.) Schools, where Vince-Uncle had been teaching.<\/p>\n
Vince was a gentle giant, standing at 6-1 and 230 pounds in his prime. Most of the rest of us teachers stood at around 5-8. When in Cuba, we heard about the time when, as a class sponsor, Vince arranged to borrow a small car to pull a float for the Cuba Rams\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 homecoming parade.<\/p>\n
But the car\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s owner never showed up, so Vince hitched straps to himself and ran the parade route, much to the thrill of the crowds.<\/p>\n
I admired Vince-Uncle. We rode bikes to school. He lived some five miles out; we lived three miles out. We rode to school almost every day, but since I was a smoker then, I struggled to keep up with him.<\/p>\n
He always placed his lesson plan book in the carrier behind his bike, but one time it fell out. I picked it up without his knowing it.<\/p>\n
Well, spit hit the fan when he arrived at school sans lesson plans. I toyed with him for a while, saying I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d seen it by the side of the road \u00e2\u20ac\u0153but didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think it was important.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Then I noticed the glazing of his eyes, the look one takes on when he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s about to defenestrate someone.<\/p>\n
I quickly produced the book and instead of being tossed out the window, I got a bear hug from the hulk. He must have thanked me a dozen times. That hug made me wish for a few seconds that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d gone ahead with Plan A.<\/p>\n
Vince-Uncle grew up in Manhattan. Although he owned a car \u00e2\u20ac\u201d or facsimile \u00e2\u20ac\u201d something almost as old as both of us \u00e2\u20ac\u201d he said he loathed the automobile. Bikes were fine.<\/p>\n
One Sunday he interrupted my Oakland Raiders game on TV to invite me on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a short bike ride.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That ride, uphill as we pedaled north, practically landed us in Farmington (or maybe just Lindrith). I could never keep up. We clocked about 40 miles on that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153short ride,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and as a pack-a-day smoker, I paid the price.<\/p>\n
Vince-Uncle took dress codes seriously. Current State Rep. Tomas Salazar, who taught with us at Cuba in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc60s, confirmed that Vince wore a black suit, shined shoes, a white shirt and black tie each day of the first semester at Cuba High School. We all believed Vince took the dress code way too seriously, and teased him about it. He soon learned to dress casually.<\/p>\n
What impressed me the most were the stories he told about his youth in The Big Apple.<\/p>\n
Vince attended a Catholic, all-boys school in Manhattan. He said he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d heard a couple of classmates bragging about conning passengers on the subway out of money. Vince said he and a friend then rigged up a wagon with a false bottom to hide their feet \u00e2\u20ac\u201d which were supposed to be missing.<\/p>\n
Playing hookey one day, they steered their little makeshift go-carts through countless trains and buses. The boys propelled the carts with thick wooden dowels. For their effort, they came up with zero cents and a plentitude of insults.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I even worked on my lower-lip quiver,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Vince said later, explaining that the trembling lip was designed to elicit sympathy.<\/p>\n
Around the time Bonnie and I left Cuba, in the early \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc70s, Vince\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s middle-class life with a wife, two kids, a house, a car and a bike, devolved into his training as a butcher, then as a plant employee, then as an adobe-maker and tree trimmer, and finally into a guy who cleaned out a swimming pool three nights a week at Kirtland Air Force Base.<\/p>\n
Vince also produced dozens of oil paintings, which left little room for furniture in his small trailer house. I own one of his works, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A Beautiful War.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
As often as I was able, I kept Vince company through his divorce and later through his two knee replacements. And the towering man I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d met at Cuba three years earlier eventually became grey, skinny \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and inches shorter.<\/p>\n
Inviting me into his life when things were rough flattered me, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d learned not to try to play counselor. Maybe it was best that I simply sat and listened.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Well, my friend, Vince-Uncle, it was a good 50 years of knowing you, inviting you to our house at Christmas, remembering the gifts you gave our three sons and grandson, joining you for bike rides \u00e2\u20ac\u201d even at our age.<\/p>\n
I think one of the factors in our kinship has been the closeness of our birthdays. Vince would have been 78 on April 15, the same day as my grandson, Arthur Roland, who turns 21. My birthday is on April 21.<\/p>\n
Sorry we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t celebrate it together, but for whatever memorial observance your daughter Rena is planning, you know I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be there, my Friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have any friends. True, there are many acquaintances, lots of colleagues, classmates, neighbors, co-workers, primos and primas, but no friends. At least not anymore. The only person I believe was my Friend died last week. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to miss him. My sons called him Vince-Uncle, I suppose because our youngest son, Ben, mixed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1618,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617\/revisions\/1618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}