With a title like that, I’m sure you know what’s coming around the bend…
There are people who exist on the periphery of our lives. This happens with everyone, it’s not exclusive to you and I. We have these folks who we know for extended periods of time, over decades even, but we only know them to a certain capacity. Maybe we see them because they own a restaurant you dine at once a week, maybe you work with them but never see them outside of work. It doesn’t matter what the circumstance is, the premise is the same. Each of us has a handful–maybe even a multitude–of acquaintances that we only know as well as we allow ourselves to know them.
After my mom stopped teaching, she started working part-time for a friend of hers, managing the books and overseeing the daily operation of his golf range. This was when I was still in elementary school. I remember days when she would take me to hit golf balls or baseballs. We would walk into the place and turn left to enter her office. There were always two other people in the office. There was Richard (the owner) who sat behind his desk and ate and watched television, and there was Jack. I never knew exactly what Jack’s job was, but he had a desk he always hunched over, and he was very old and cranky. I don’t know how old, but to me it was very old. I remember sitting in a chair in the office watching Jack eat. He had white hair, and old, wrinkled skin hung from his face. He had a white moustache that would catch bits of food. Jack and Richard always carried on conversation with food in their mouths.
When I received my first set of golf clubs (not the junior set I had as a child), my mother brought me to the range to hit some balls. I had taken lessons with the professionals who were employed by the range through the years, and had taken to the sport quickly due to my time as a tennis player. A tennis swing is actually very similar to a golf swing. One day Jack said he wanted to watch me hit a bucket of balls, so we went outside and I ran to a booth on the far right side of the range while he filled the pail at the green, archaic ball machine. He watched as I struggled, focusing too hard on trying to kill each ball. Jack gave some pointers. I don’t remember them helping, but it’s hard to remember any advice working because I’m a pretty terrible golfer. Jack said that once the weather got a little warmer we would go out on a local par 3 and play some holes together. I agreed. When the weather got nicer I went to overnight camp and never thought twice about the agreement we made.
Jack retired and I didn’t see him for a while. There were rumors that he was very sick, that he had gone completely blind, couldn’t hear and wasn’t “doing well.” I started working at the golf range when I turned fourteen, and had regular weekly shifts by the time I was seventeen. Jack would call up sometimes and yell into the phone, “Let me speak to Richie.” Sometimes he would ask who he was speaking to, and he would always recognize my loud response with joy and ask how I was and whether or not I was playing golf and how my mom and my sister were. One summer I had a shift on a day that Jack would come in with a man named Sam who stayed with Jack as live-in help. He would shuffle very slowly inside and feel his way to the front desk. We would talk and he would smile and tell me how he remembered me as a little boy.
I don’t remember the last time I saw Jack, and by that I mean, I don’t remember when it was. But I remember the events and the words that were shared. He showed up with Sam, he was going to have lunch with Richard. He came through the door clad in sweaters and a jacket, thick black sunglasses and a hat pulled low over his head. He moved very slowly to the front desk. He asked who was working, and I said “It’s Evan Jack,” loud enough that someone outside the building might have heard. “Oh, Evan!” He started to smile and took my hand in his. I lead him around the desk and he said, “How are ya, Evan?” I told him I was good. He asked how school was and I told him I was studying journalism (lest I confuse him with “Communications”). He told me that was wonderful. He never lifted his head, he just kind of looked straight ahead. His back was bad and he was hunched over.
He then asked me very loudly, “Do you remember when we were going to go out and play golf together?”
“Of course I remember. You were watching me hit out there.”
“We never got to play golf together.”
I wasn’t entirely sure how to answer, and probably responded with something like, “I know,” or “Yeah…”
That was the last time I saw him. As I was leaving for work today, my mother told me Jack died this morning. When I arrived at work Richard was talking about it with Stan, who’s shift precedes mine on Tuesdays. I wanted to say something about it, to offer condolences or something, but I couldn’t. I just kept hearing, “We never got to play golf together.”
I suppose maybe the circumstances surrounding the death of a person you know force you to think about particular instances when you do or say something that fills you with remorse or regret. An unkept promise, a harsh word, the “should haves…” It’s the minutiae of different relationships which means next to nothing in the present and eventually becomes magnified.
The intention here isn’t to ask for condolences. The truth is I barely knew the man, he was just a person who existed in the margins. If anything, his departure was a catalyst that forced me to think a little harder about who the other acquaintances in my life are, and what differentiates them from the people I see on a more frequent basis. At the risk of committing a cardinal sin(show, don’t tell!), I’ll admit the intention of today’s story was to see if any of you drew parallels to your own experiences. Maybe you even saw a particular face while reading this. Is it just happenstance, that we never truly know these people? I don’t know…
