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Days and evenings with Herbie

It was never made clear whether his condition was the result of trauma-induced brain damage or of a genetic defect. I wish I knew the answer, but I suppose it really doesn’t matter since he has been gone for many years now.

He was a slow, heavy, dark skinned, hairy man who kept himself clean and well-groomed, dressed according to the season (here, in this memory, in cotton short sleeves and plaid Bermuda shorts). He always carried a white handkerchief to clean his wire-rim glasses or wipe away the beads that constantly reformed at the end of his long Roman nose and hung there upon the thick, black, cropped hairs of his nostrils.

Mostly he worked in the yard of old Mrs. Lawson (who had adopted him sometime before I was born), slowly cropping hedges, collecting windfall, or weeding the garden, always careful to not to trample the flowers or chop the good roots.

He, 40-something, and I, 8 and fatherless, lived a house apart on this shady, college-town street in Fredonia where, despite his retardation, his slow speech and stutter, and his chronic monotone humming, he was my companion across the green meadows, cherry orchards and then on to the college frontier.

While I played on the fringes among the dirt piles, hay bales, concrete drainpipes, and lumber stacks, Herbie stood at the rim of the building site supervising construction from under the yellow helmet given to him by the workers. He hummed steadily, in tune with the greater engine of bulldozer, crane, and backhoe.

Later that summer, a professor’s only son who lived nearby began to emerge from his private playhouse to join Herbie and me. In the evenings, Billy and I improvised a game called GOON, a variation on hide-and-seek in which Herbie was always “IT” — the designated monster who would raise his humming to a weird moaning sound and flush us out screeching from tree, bush, or shed to flee in terrible ecstasy across the browning lawns.

So we played on, finding secret nooks in the growing shadows until one early twilight, when the second breath of August stirred the leaves to uneasy whisper, Billy burst hysterical from the shed: “Herbie turned violent, Herbie turned violent!”

Of course Herbie had not really; he had merely hammed up his role, revving his engine to shake in its mounts, the pitch of his drone playing the reedy clapboards of the old shed where Bill cowered in a bin among discarded toys.

So in the phantom eves at the end of one summer, he, forever 40-something and I, now 12, stood at 50 paces on the college lawn where I instructed him in the art of throwing a baseball — not pinch — armed from the ear like a girl, but more roundhouse, elbow cocked wide like Whitey Ford or Don Drysdale.

Although he cooperated, he barely progressed and never really learned the trick of it, and eventually, at old Mrs. Lawson’s nightly yodeling across the neighborhood “HERbert, HerBERT!” he would leave me alone there, tossing easy poppers into the mauve dome above the embers of this day now gone.

If I want, I can still see him: a series of porch lights record the lean and switch of his shadow across the lawns. And because I knew him as the figure of both grown man and child, I find comfort in the prospect that there might be a God somewhere out there like Herbie — one who is vigilant, and in his droning procession is always careful to pull out the bad weeds and to never trample his lovely gardens.

Pete Howard is a Dunkirk resident, writer, musician and teacher. FOCAL Point strives to make insightful social commentary through the integration of Facts, Observations, Compassion, Awareness, and Logic.

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