Tag Archives: mentor

I’m the Ugliest

I feel like I should be writing something about you, Jay. That’s what I do. I write to express emotion, I write to stay sane and, among other things, I write to grieve.

Usually, things will start to formulate when something needs to come out, I’ll get snippets rattling around my brain. When I’ve amassed enough snippets that stick, then I sit down and try to sort through them and put them in proper order. But I’m having trouble with you. Big surprise, right. Most people who knew you thought that “Trouble” might have been your middle name. And they loved you for that.

I know when I’m sitting here trying to think of more to say, I’ll feel like I haven’t done you justice and that will be true. I’ll do my best, though and hope you already know all the things that I don’t mention.

I believe I met you first when I went to work at the courthouse in the Civil Division. You instantly took me under your wing, you never made me feel like a bother, but like I was doing you a favor by letting you train me. You took me over to get my work car from the person I was replacing. He was dying of cancer and you made what could have been a most uncomfortable situation, much more comfortable.

You did things like that. You made things easier for people on one hand, even while you were razzing the hell out of them on the other hand. Teaching seemed to come natural and easy to you. I never felt like a bad student, even when I asked you the same question over and over. Yes, you razzed me about it, but in such a good-hearted way that it never stung.

You told me who to trust and who not to trust. You were right on every one. You showed me how to drop serve someone, and I still laugh at the look on their face.

I wish I could do a traffic stop on you, just to talk. The same way you used to do to me, and others when you saw us driving through Williston. I wish I could know that the next time I’m eating breakfast at Hilltop, you’ll come walking in and comment on how it’s nice that there’s a restaurant in town that will serve anybody. The waitress will ask you if you want coffee and you’ll say, “No Ma’am, I’m driving.”

I wish we could be sitting down on the end of Fourth Street using the Laser Radar to clock dogs, or trees, or people on bicycles or just about anything else that was moving.

I wish we were sitting on your porch up in Cherokee, watching the creek go by. I know you loved that place.

I will always wish I spent more time with you. I’m sure I missed out on so much by not making more time for you. That will be a sadness I will carry for a very long time.

You always called me “Ugly” and some of the times I remember most were arguing over who was the ugliest. Well, it turns out you were right, I was ugliest, because you Sir, were a beautiful man. I love you and even though we haven’t spent a lot of time together lately, I miss you already.

Just so you don’t feel weird about all this, let me just say……Damn, you’re ugly!

Rest in Peace, Brother.

Mr. Thomas

So much time has passed that details elude me. I try to remember because I know how much it would mean to me to remember. But I’ve forgotten so much.
Prospect, New York, a town of three hundred and fifty people or so, even now, was an excellent place to grow up in the 1960s. It taught me lessons about community and knowing your neighbors, about reaching out and helping where I could. It was the kind of place where a little boy could sell yesterday’s newspapers to the neighbors for a nickel with a cookie thrown in as a tip for delivering them right to their front door. It was the kind of place where a neighbor would stop by every day to have a little boy tag along with him up the hill to the post office and impart on him more wisdom and direction than he could ever know.
Mr. Thomas was very tall, or so it seemed to me but then I was quite small. I do remember that I had to reach high to hold his giant hand. He was a published author, though I didn’t really understand what that meant. He was most definitely a local historian, that being the subject of his writing, but I didn’t really understand about that either. I know that we started our daily walks to the post office before the age that I started school but I’m not sure if they ended altogether when I entered kindergarten or whether they were only relegated to weekends. You see, I’m not sure just when they started or exactly when they ended.
I don’t remember the contents of even one conversation we had. I don’t remember what his voice sounded like or what his face looked like. I only know that we had conversations. I know that whatever he said to me at such a young age clung to my heart and sparked a fire that has wafted and waned from time to time, but has never gone completely out. It has lost its way while I wandered down paths too numerous to recall, but it has always held tight in piece or part and is an ingredient in that recipe that has served as the core of that which defines myself to me. It is a component of me that seems as if it was always there. Its roots sunk deep into stone even when the wind and rain tried their hardest to sweep it away.
That spark has been a place to escape when things were difficult. It’s been an old friend to me on stormy days. A candle in the window and a fire in the hearth, arms to hold me, a gentle voice to comfort me. It has been a way to scream my most painful epithets to those who never had to feel their sting or bite. It has kept me from apologies I could never have found the words for. It helped me to decide what to keep within my heart and what to allow to peel from me like a skin that needed shed. It has saved me from myself and sorted out the webs and vines that twist from time to time to confuse me and make me lose my way.
In figurative terms, it has been a god to me but in reality, it has been the bridge back to my God. It has helped me to unwind and refine that which I believe and that which I don’t. It has helped to sort those things that I draw near to me and bask in, but also, those things which I shun. It has allowed things to flow from my heart that I did not know were mine. For better or for worse, it has shown me all those things that I am made of.
Such a difference the spark of writing has made in my life. Such a difference a kind old gentleman made, whether I can remember the details or not. I gave him my company in walking to the post office at the top of the hill and he showed me my eyes for seeing the world around me and turning it to writing on a page.