If you were to die today, how many people do you think would notice and or care? Can you count them on one hand?
Are you sure about that?
For the past several years, a man named Tom has walked past my desk at work and stopped to chat. He is usually smiling and does his best to come up with a funny story to tell me. These stories are some times of his past, some times of things that have happened recently. The humor is not in the subject matter so much, but in their telling, of which only a middle aged black man from the south would be capable.
I learned of his cat, "Boris-Anne", so named because Tom thought that Boris was a great name for a male cat until the vet informed him that Boris was female.
I was told of the time he decided that the tires of his truck were low. He pulled into a gas station and up to the air hose. After putting air in one tire, he used a tire gauge to check the psi. This is what confused him. He saw "psi" and wondered what that meant.
"So ah thought to mahsef, hmmmm. Oh ah know! Put. Some. In!"
Sometime later he was informed that psi stood for pounds per square inch, at this he looked at me with his eyes wide, put both hands flat on my desk, bent his knees and said, "Ah dint know!!"
These stories were usually prefaced by his usual greeting of, "Ah think you should jus' go ahead and go home. Ain't nobody gonna know you left. Jus' put yo stuff on the des' with a note that says 'Use it if ya need it'."
Sometimes after that he would look at the picture of the director, hanging on the wall (her name was Debbie and he wasn't fond of her) and say, "Ah still think we should play 'Hide Debbie'! Ah'd jus' hide her picture in someone's cubicle and they'd siddown and see her picture and go 'AHHHHHHHH!!!'" Again, with his eyes wide and knees bent. He also might, once again, invite me to go with him to Draper the following Saturday to visit his "friend" in prison. This friend was convicted of double homicide. I would always turn down Tom on this offer, and he would always try to argue reasons why it would be fun.
Occasionally he would have to talk to customer support from some company or another, and after getting frustrated with the person to whom he was talking (he'd tell me) he'd "Tell that witch that if she dint hep me, I'd drive down there and pull out her hair weave!" This while making grasping motions with one hand.
At one point, he made sure to teach me the "I Don't Care Song", which consisted of one verse, sung over and over while bobbing up and down and from side to side: "I don't care. I don't care. Zoom zoom zoom. Bing Bing Bing." This was the song to sing when dealing with people who usually needed their hair weaves pulled out.
When he saw that he either needed to go home or get back to work, whichever the case, he would wave to me and say, "Well, ah guess ah'd betta go before they catch me. See yaaa!"
I started dating my wife in August of 2003. I was just beginning to get to know Tom then and he would ask how things were going with us, on occasion. Sarah and I were later engaged and I gave Tom an invitation to the reception. I remember being at the reception and seeing his bald, bespectacled head come down the walk to the reception center. He was impeccably dressed, as he was a man with class. He came in, expressed his congratulations to my wife and I, and sat down at a table next to my 86-ish year old grandmother.
My grandmother was raised in Wyoming, Utah and Idaho and still had the mentality of a depression -era survivor. She had not a single prejudiced bone in her body. However, when and where she was raised, people of different ethnicity did not mingle.
And here was Tom sitting next to her, giving the place some needed color (and I don't mean just his skin) to all of us stiff white folk. I think Tom sensed that my Grandmother was a little uncomfortable, because (as I later found out from both of them) he very politely looked at her and said, "And how are you?" My Grandmother replied, "I'm very good, thank you."
To which, Tom replied, "Would you like to dance?" while pointing at the dance floor. My Grandmother didn't know what to think until Tom gave just a slight smirk. My grandmother then burst out laughing and continued until she was in tears. Later on, at work, Tom told me "She was a lovely woman, and ah was jus' bein' polite."
Tom gave my wife and I an 85 dollar rotisserie as a wedding gift.
Tom died of heart complications two days after Christmas. He'd had a heart valve replacement and had come back to work for half days, after three months recovery, and appeared to be his normal self, along with some new stories about how he had given the nurses a difficult time.
The following is what pains me: Tom had no family. Apparently, for reasons that are not important, his family had disowned him and he moved to Utah, never speaking to them again. This was roughly 30 years ago. He was alone every Christmas and Thanksgiving. When he died, no relative could be found to claim his body and the mortuary had to take responsibility. His next door neighbor had to be named executor for his estate, and his emergency contact information was his work address and phone. His friends, his coworkers, cleaned out his desk with tears streaming down their faces.
It could, of course, be said that Tom's family was us. But the tragedy is that I don't know if he knew that. I think, because of his reluctance to get really personal with anybody, that for some, he is a case of 'don't know what you got till it's gone.' And I find that to be almost unbearable.
Everybody matters, to somebody. Even if it's the person at whom you smile when you walk in to work. It is the small things, that make you memorable.
I'll miss you, my friend. Thank you, and go ahead and go, before they catch you.
http://obitsutah.com/show_obit.php?id=4278
