The unexpected ways by which Eternity informs us through our fellows that one we loved has been snatched from our ever more lonely midst, is of increasing interest to this crumb as he and his diminish.
Yesterday my Wife called from Portland and she talked to a real faerie tale princess, Ruby by name. My fellow fighter’s child had awakened me with an etch a sketch geometry test, which I failed, as Wilson the pretentious cat whined for his fancy feast and Janie the mutt licked the cut on my shoulder. It was a good morning. Flop the zero phone was handed to Ruby and the Lady from Alaska assured her that she was “so pretty” and would someday be “a beautiful woman.”
Off to work in the yard and a return to the phone brought a missed call from my Cascadia Land Lady. Knowing something was wrong, I called—no answer. A text came, “Kelly passed away this morning.”
Something in my chest sank. I knew that my Wife would be on vigil with Kelly’s wife for the next couple of days. She has become a full time mourner as time scythes down one of her hometown circle every month it seems.
I told Erique as Ruby ate her yogurt.
He said, “I’m so sorry. I’m getting sick of losing so many people, my head is still dealing with my father passing. Who was he, what was he like? How did you meet? Talk about him as long as you need to. You’re going to write an eulogy, right? Let the readers know?”
We met at his house, the Wife brought me over for a movie night and he cooked dinner. We hit it off. Once we found out we had both boxed and worked in the supermarket business we just clicked. His arm wrestling stories were so cool—guy did a lot, would teach strange kids how to fish and give each an entire tackle set. This past winter Kelly had a man on his street bring his 8 year old son over each week so he could hand out a present, often valuable antiques of interest to a boy. He trained horses, guided hunts, was involved in legal and illegal boxing, sold coke on Friday nights for a few years. He would apologize for telling me the same stories over again. I encouraged him to. I told him I’d type down his stories and publish it as a book. He would laugh, a snicker laugh, like the dog on the Dudley Do Right cartoon. He was a sweet man—looked like a viking with short white hair, still had all his hair. But he told me, since he retired, that his heart and kidneys went bad and that he was looking at medical procedures he wasn’t up for.
I found out two weeks ago that Kelly had fallen while helping his wife get around. Kelly’s life has revolved for the past two years around taking care of his wife’s health needs. He once played Santa Clause and still looked the part and had exactly that kind of jolly heart. He did though, have an edge, a limit. He reminded me a lot like a late 60s version of Big Ron, an easy, kind man, with a moderately projected sense of humor, who has a line in his mind that most jerks somehow know not to cross. For Kelly it was beating women. He was born to an abandoned mother of 7 [I think] and would not stand for men beating women. He confided that this was not all chivalry, “I had my ass kicked enough that I knew I was no world beater. So when I see a man who beats a woman, I know he’s mine—him and I roll, and he’s the woman. You know, even a little guy like you who can fight, you know most men don’t have the heart for a fight and that the ones that can’t help but beat women, are hanging out a sign advertising it.”
When Kelly fell, he would not let the women present, one of them a fit scrappy athlete of 40, help him up. I was enjoined not to mention this too him. So I waited a couple days and asked him by text how he was doing. He texted, “A little rough L****’s been having a hard time with health issues.”
Yesterday I had planned on calling him about the training session on Saturday. He loved hearing about me getting my ass kicked for staying in the fight game too long. He really liked seeing the group photos of the men, lining them up against one another in his mind.
Kelly liked my curiosity and told me everything he could about fishing, horses, dogs, hunting, trucking, driving, and football, very much like Bob in Utah, a volunteer big brother for an old runt who never had an older brother. He actually trained me in arm wrestling, saving me from a fight with an agitated young man in a bar, who I was able to mollify through agreeing to arm wrestling.
Kelly is one of the best men I have known. I miss him. The odd parts of us that clicked and tracked, those are lonely places in the soul. Every one of you who is a fighter, know this, that you will meet a hundred men, and none of them, or perhaps one, will join you on the edge of the heard where the pack roams. They will sit and cheer MMA girls kicking in another cutie’s face, yell at a ball player mishandling a play on TV, dismiss hand to hand fighting as stupid. All the while these men, that in a man’s world might be your friends, your scalps or your slaves, regard you with an odd sense of dread, for reminding them that you are the toaster and they are only a slice of bread.
At bars and restaurants, Kelly sat like a kind old king, comfortable in his self effacing humor, able to chuckle snicker-wise at little things and give even more “messed up” men room to vent their frustration at life, lives that pained them so much more than Kelly’s mostly because they had never fought, never put it all on the line, never walked into a bar full of drunken Indians looking for where they had stashed Clint.
I only spoke with Kelly one time since mid July, when we last shook hands and he pulled me in like a big bear and assured me we were brothers. It was a phone call on Tuesday night, our movie night. I asked him how he was doing and he said, “Would be doing better if I wasn’t practicing drinking this cheap fucking beer for when you get back! Here, I’m dumping this piss out—got me a Coors Light and the mountains are blue. I miss you, Brother. You always have a place to stay while I’m alive.”
I pray that Kelly has been taken to a better place.
